Cancer survivors less likely to receive callbacks from potential employers
sciencedaily.com
sciencedaily.com
Fortunately they explain it fairly quickly: They wear baseball caps saying "cancer survivor" and/or include that they had cancer on their resumes for no reason, other than for the study.
The way I see it, had I read on a resume that someone is a cancer survivor (or any other unwarranted personal detail that's clearly being shoehorned in) I'd find it very off-putting. That alone (along with the "wear a baseball cap" thing accounts for the discrepancy in hiring, as far as I'm concerned.
This isn't even fake science, this is just a piece designed to generate outrage.
Control group wore plain white hats, and each participant acted as their own control by applying to one store with a cancer hat and a different with the plain hat:
> In the experimental condition, confederates wore hats and provided resumes that disclosed cancer survivor status. The resumes included the following statement, “Please note: There is a gap in my employment because I was diagnosed and treated for cancer. I have been in remission for one year” and the hat had the words “Cancer Survivor” depicted across the front. In the control condition, the resume provided no extra information and participants wore a plain white hat. Finally, it is important to note that all confederates served as their own control—they entered some stores wearing the “Cancer Survivor” hat and other stores with the plain white hat. Confederate applicants remained blind to condition
Really? Are they announcing, or just being themselves. I guess in a certain way we all "announce" who we want to be perceived as in public.
Bystander: "Oh my god, this man is dying! Is anyone here a doctor!?" Vegan: "I'm a vegan"
But why should people have to do that?
I've not seen anyone address an employment gap in their cover letter but I could see someone doing so. If your resume has a notable gap and another resume is similar but doesn't, you're less likely to get an interview. With that in mind, you might explain the gap in a cover letter, especially if it can be described as a positive or you can put a positive spin on it (I'm not just talking about gaps for health reasons).
... and so they do have to.
It's regrettable, because employment history (gaps or no gaps) does not predict job performance.
Why don't you think that employment history predicts job performance? That seems to violate common sense for me.
Imagine that you can hire from a pool of hundreds of candidates who are 10 years out of college, and can be classified into two groups: members of Group A have worked full time for 10 years, and members of Group B worked full time for 5 years, and have not been employed for the last 5 years. (or were employed in an entirely unrelated profession).
Which group will have better average job performance? Group A of course, since its members have been working in that field for the last 5 years, instead of not working or doing an unrelated job, and also since they have double the years of work experience. They are more likely than Group B to be up to speed on latest industry knowledge.
It's clear that employment history will be predictive of job performance if you believe that "years of experience" has some predictive value, since employment history affects work experience. The smaller the gap, the less impact on performance, but there's still an effect. No gap is best.
I think you could also hypothesize that people with gaps in their employment history are more likely to have undesirable traits for an employer than those with no gaps. Insofar as we treat past history as predictive of future results, it seems reasonable to conclude that members of Group B are more likely to have gaps in their employment in the future than Group A. At least some members of Group B had gaps in their employment for reasons related to their own preferences, and their preferences will influence whether they work in the future, etc. Perhaps members of Group B like to travel the world, and after they save up for 5 more years, they'll travel the word for 5 years again, whereas members of Group A will work straight for another 10 more years. An employer will on average want to hire members of Group A since they represent a greater payoff on the investment of hiring them.
We can rarely act with perfect information about the world, and there does not exist a study on every topic about which we'd wish to have conclusions. I believe intuitively that more total work experience correlates with better performance, and that more recent work experience does too. People with gaps are at a disadvantage on one or both measures.
Because empiricism: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/833-years-of-irrelevance
> Which group will have better average job performance?
The two groups are statistically indiscernible.
How about heart surgery? If you or a family member needed to have a risky or complex medical operation done, would you prefer to use a specialist in that field who has done that surgery for 15 years, or would you prefer to be operated on by a surgical resident who is qualified to do the surgery but has limited experience? Which doctor has better average patient outcomes?
Programming alone is not the only discipline that businesses need. They also require skills like leadership, business sense, product and design sense, etc. There are many kinds of aptitude that one develops by having done something before. Imagine that your programming task requires designing a new Linux kernel API. Two programmers have equal experience, but one built Ruby web applications, and the other was a kernel developer who designed cgroups. Who will have the advantage in designing the new API?
Relevant experience in any area that's broad like business or medicine will tend to make someone better. I believe that you can craft a set of "programming challenges" that will show that people with limited experience can perform as well as those with much experience - I don't think that programming challenges benefit from the kind of judgment and insight and leadership that experience brings. Experience benefits some tasks, but not all of them. Furthermore, knowledge in some areas might be relatively shallow. The Peopleware study purports to be about "knowledge of a platform" according to a blog:
> Once they had six months under their belt, the platform knowledge was no longer the bottleneck in their abilities.
Six months might be enough to reach 99% diminishing returns for knowledge about the platform. I can believe that. I don't think this establishes a general point about the effect of experience on performance. Experience benefits some tasks more than others. I doubt that six months is the point of diminishing returns for heart surgery, for example, and for many types of engineering.
Broadly, I don't understand the alternative belief: are we saying that people do not become more effective with experience at all, for any task? Not even a little?
I certainly study diligently and apply myself every day toward getting better, and I certainly seem to be getting more effective in a variety of ways. But I cannot believe that we are fixed as humans the day we turn 18, and can become no more competent than we were then. It violates common sense. The fact that experience might have diminishing marginal returns after a certain point does not mean that experience is worthless, though it may mean that for that task you don't benefit from hiring someone with any more experience than that. But, to hire in such a specific way as that, you need to know what the cutoff is across every type of expertise that matters. If we conceptualize performance as skill across a range of dimensions, then probably many of them improve with experience, though not all will.
I believe that larger-scope tasks are likely to be the ones that benefit the most from experience, such as: leading a business, or designing a large system, or high-leverage pieces of engineering such as kernel APIs. Programming challenges and other tasks "in the small" likely benefit less after the cutoff. For example, in medicine, I could believe that once you have a certain amount of experience drawing blood, that more experience does not make you much better at finding a vein and getting the needle in properly. A doctor with 15 years of experience will probably not perform much better at that task than a nurse with more limited experience. That's a task with (I'm just assuming) a low skill ceiling. Other tasks, like leading a heart surgery, or leading the design of a large system, have a far higher skill ceiling.
Fortunately, there is a better way: http://www.ioatwork.com/selection-methods-almost-a-century-o...
EDIT: but to answer your question:
> How about heart surgery?
I'd prefer the provider that hires doctors based on work-sample tests and not years of employment.
Interestingly, the study also says:
> work sample tests are the most costly of the three (although likely the best approach when hiring for positions that need specialized skills)
This roughly matches how a lot of hiring is done in practice, with the exception of evaluating candidates based on general intelligence. Unfortunately, candidates do not tend to take intelligence tests ahead of time to include in their resumes (nor would they be likely to as part of a specific interview), so this is not a suggestion that's easy to apply to typical hiring. Instead, hiring managers rely on years of experience, work sample tests, personal interests, and years of education, all which this study reports have positive predictive validity.
What concrete change should a manager of a small business make tomorrow to improve their hiring?
Job performance does improve with experience up to a point (evidently six months), so this factor will have some predictive validity just for that, but this does not support comparing five years vs ten years.
> Can a hiring manager improve their hiring decision by excluding a factor known to have positive predictive validity?
Yes, if the manager had given undue weight to that factor (say, by rejecting applicants with little experience, regardless of performance on job knowledge tests), which is precisely what happens whenever managers consider employment history.
> This roughly matches how a lot of hiring is done in practice
No, what happens in practice is that managers say "no unemployed need apply" or ask for the applicant's "most recent résumé" (with dates, of course) and then exercise the sort of prejudice against the unemployed that you displayed earlier.
> What concrete change should a manager of a small business make tomorrow to improve their hiring?
The manager should filter applicants using GMA tests, job knowledge tests and integrity tests, which are inexpensive and have high validity, and then pay the candidates to take work-sample tests. The manager may consider experience (up to six months), but as no more than 5% of each candidate's grade, and this should be monitored by the business owner.
Except you often don't get the opportunity to explain anything because you've been culled by a computer for having any gap at all.
I'd think that the applicants with 'cancer survivor' emblazoned on their hat could come across as making an appeal for sympathy and that is out of place in that setting illustrating poor judgement beyond wearing a hat indoors. Their discussion on the perception that cancer survivors are 'warm' but less 'competent' makes me think they undermined their study since they made a confounding incompetent-but-warm action. A better control might have had an animal charity hat and spent time volunteering.
It's a shame because it would be interesting to know how it would have turned out had they not wore the hats. Or maybe the control group could have taken a year off to go skydiving on the resume and worn a hat that said "I love skydiving"
I would think that cancer survivor has a significantly more developed sense of awareness and mindfulness. Surviving * is a deeply profound experience that changes people. I don't understand why that would be off-putting to you.
Be that as it may, the thing that some might find off-putting is not 'surviving cancer' but appearing to be using that to gain sympathy points in a job application.
Still, I hold a belief that those traits in fact increase competence and I don't mind people trying to gain sympathy points in job application.
It's quite a cognitive leap from "I think there's a methodology flaw" to "this is just a piece designed to generate outrage".
Note that this flaw is discussed in the 'limitations' section of the paper.
Like what was the biggest struggle you over came?
How will we know your dependable and you'll come to work with sniffles?
Since your greatest strength can be your biggest weakness, "What is your greatest strength and how did you use it your life?"
I have hired dozens of people and whenever it was with someone else they figured they needed every bit of information to make sure they don't get in trouble with highers a dud. I must have stopped questions a bunch of times when it was personal information that my co-worker was asking.
"I have hired dozens of people. Whenever I worked with a co-worker during the hiring process, the co-worker figured they needed every bit of information about the applicant to make sure they wouldn't get in trouble for hiring a dud. I stopped applicants from answering my co-worker's questions a bunch of times when it was personal information that my co-worker was asking, because certain question are illegal to ask during the hiring process."
Am I close?
I also made sure that we didn't do the "dumb question" to see how they handle that. EXAMPLE from my interview "If you had to remove one state from American what state would it be and why?"
My answer (North Dakota because most people don't even know it exist) They laughed and said it was the best answer they got form my group.
According to the article, the people who did not get a job were the ones who "indicated on their resumes they were cancer survivors AND WORE A HAT that read 'cancer survivor' when applying for a job."
NEWS FLASH: Wearing a novelty baseball cap to a job interview may not be the best idea -- cancer or not.
The control either should have involved people wearing hats for another cause and/or they should have had a resume-mention only group in the test.
Point of fact, I would not be suprised if discrimination exists. But no need to rig the test.
> In the control condition, the resume provided no extra information and participants wore a plain white hat. Finally, it is important to note that all confederates served as their own control—they entered some stores wearing the “Cancer Survivor” hat and other stores with the plain white hat.
Yup, total linkbait writing here. I was able to find more info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10533808
When my son's cancer did come back the second job (And my main job) were both outstanding and really gave me flexibility and understanding, but I doubt I would have gotten the job the first place. It is hard to figure out what to disclose and what not to disclose for simple jobs like retail.
Unfortunately he passed away 2 years ago. We had an incredible supportive local community and few local organizations who's purpose was supporting local families.
I do highly recommend supporting St. Baldrick's http://www.stbaldricks.org/ for cancer research. Kids get the shaft in research money especially with only 1% from Cancer Society of America and 4% of the Federal Cancer Research Grants got o fight pediatric cancer. Any adult research is of little value to kids, but any findings with kids benefits adults in cancer treatment. So in 20+ years we have the first new chemo drug because of St Baldrick's research funded project paid off.
Edit: Victor Hugo lost his daughter and subsequently wrote what I consider to be one of the most beautiful poems in the French language. Here it is with an English translation: http://www.frenchtoday.com/french-poetry-reading/poem-demain...
I wish I could do more.
Even if people don't have a conscious bias against potential liabilities that an employee might have, I'd suspect that subconsciously they do due to a general awareness of their own bottom line. When it comes time to make a hiring decision (an already an a-rational and largely emotional process), the subconscious biases against taking on a potential liability will probably manifest themselves, causing employers to invent an unrelated "reason" to disqualify a cancer-survivor candidate. Or maybe it's just an invisible push to the bottom of the pile without any false narratives. Either way, I assume the data doesn't lie.
If I'm hiring, I want the best possible candidate for the job at the best possible price. Someone who has a higher likelihood of being absent is less likely to be the best possible candidate for the job. Those emotional biases have real foundations.
I happen to belong to a protected group and also have a higher chance of being absent; I disclose that status, do my best to indicate that I am the best possible candidate, and let the chips fall where they may. It's worked alright for me so far, although I'm sure that it's cost me a little.
That's not it at all.
The goal of hiring is simple: maximize the effectiveness of the company by hiring people who are the most effective at least cost. Typically, the hiring manager thinks about what he needs and reduces the hiring question to: "For this role, we need a person with these skills or better, and we're willing to pay this amount or less."
Then you evaluate candidates to determine their effectiveness.
Many factors impact someone's relative effectiveness: if they take time off work for any reason, then they are less effective than someone who is equal in other ways but works full time. You simply get more weeks of effort out of them for the same pay - it's really simple. It has nothing to do with being "unacceptable" so much as a "bad deal for the employer".
Imagine that you're considering two candidates, one who you believe will work full time, and another who you think has 25% chance of working half-time (while being paid for full time) over some period. The two employees are equal otherwise. The expected value of the first worker is 100%1.0 = 1.0, and the expected value of the second worker is (25%)(0.5) + (75%1.0) = 0.875. Thus by going with the first worker, your expected outcome is 14% better.
Imagine that the second worker is 10% better than the first. Then his expected value is (25%)(1.10/2) + (75%*1.10) = 0.96, or still worse than the regular worker. The worker who is 25% likely to work half-time must be 15% better in order for their expected value to equal a normal worker.
The results change rapidly if they are more than 25% likely to take time off, and if they work less than half-time. If they are 25% likely to stop working completely, then they have to be 33% more competent in order for the expected value to equal a regular worker.
All of this ignores the practical complexity of employees who take time off work unpredictably. The problem is that for the company to function, the job still needs to get done, which means burdening other employees, or hiring more employees - but if you hire another employee, then they won't be needed when the first employee comes back, and they are by law entitled to their same job.
A simple rational analysis shows that workers who work full time have a better expected value for an employer, and are a lot simpler to deal with because they're predictable and you can plan around their schedule.
Maybe he got fired from the good jobs and couldn't get a job somewhere good again and had to move somewhere cheaper to take a job more readily available. Maybe he or a family member had cancer and wanted to be near the world's best particular cancer care. I'd probably be a lot more strongly biased to hire the person who was willing to sacrifice his career for a while to save someone's life than otherwise.
(Although Stanford and UCSF are pretty good...)
I really didn't care the age of who I hired but my company was tiny and it was a struggle for me to pay a good salary and provide insurance (both of which I did). I was not looking to take advantage of anybody. However if somebody came on and went on extended medical leave, I wouldn't have been able to keep paying them - not out of personal greed but because there literally would not be money to pay them. My salary was not much, if any more than my employees. Possible I might have had some legal obligation to keep providing some type of insurance - I'm not sure.
As it turns out he was completely unqualified - his resume did not jive at all with his knowledge - so I did not have to face the dilemma of whether I would hire him vs a younger, healthier applicant. But it did make me think and appreciate both sides of the situation.
For very early-stage companies where the total employees (and potentially revenue) can be counted on one hand, all hires are critical.
So a single hire who goes on extended medical leave, or sends your insurance rates through the roof can literally kill your company. Is it the person's fault? Not at all, but you are still left dealing with the consequences.
I wonder how early-stage companies draw this line and deal with this type of decision assuming the reason is not related to any of the protected classes from a hiring standpoint.
I know when I was younger it never even occurred to me to wonder where my paycheck came from.
Either way, the well-intentioned laws governing discrimination in hiring will always be toothless as long as there is any legal reason to not hire a person that otherwise meets the stated job qualifications.
NFL quarterback, MLB pitcher, NHL goalie are obvious examples, but my strongest senior employees are closer to that spread of ability and "value" versus the field than a pieceworker in a clothing factory or assembly line could ever be (and are compensated accordingly).
I also regularly hire people who don't meet the letter of the stated job qualifications. I certainly don't want to devolve to a lawyerly interpretation of job descriptions as contracts and litigate whether or not Chris Jones did or did not objectively meet the stated JD or whether I became aware that Chris Jones did meet them before I was aware that Terry Smith did, or whether after becoming aware that both met the qualifications, why I did not engage in salary negotiations to determine the lowest price that each would accept to join.
"I believe that candidate X was stronger than candidate Y [or a better value]" are valid reasons to select candidate X over Y, even if they both meet the job desc and regardless of whether either is in a majority or minority group of any sort, IMO.
Unfortunately, when mis-used, that hiring manager flexibility results in some ugly outcomes. It also results in a lot of good outcomes (where the strongest candidates are highly sought after, and where there is incentive to distinguish yourself positively as a candidate and as an employee).
There will always be a lawful reason to not hire a person, therefore any unlawful reasons to not hire are simply unenforceable against any employer that wisely refrains from opening its big mouth and confessing to any of them.
Essentially, such laws merely instruct potential employers to never give prospective employees any reason for anything, and they suffer the unlawful discrimination anyway. The legislators thought only of their intent, and paid no heed to detection and enforcement.
They can't fix the problem shown via experiment and statistical analysis in the article with a new law, because they law they would pass to do so already exists.
My wife is a survivor and she'd would never show that side of her life during the interview phase of employment. It just makes sense. Once you get the gig, and has more meaningful relationships with the people she would likely share. It's kind of assumed you never get that personal in an interview.
The only reason we have science is because "common sense" is too easily fooled.
A study lacking the power to prove its hypothesis doesn't disprove the hypothesis.