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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

> I always get frustrated when I can read more into the resume than may have been intended. Membership in the "hundred black men" or the "A[si]an American student organization" provides me with information I would prefer not to know.

Would you resent a resume from an applicant named "Mengying Zhou"? Would that carry less information than membership in the Asian American student association? I claim it carries more.

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It's impractical to not mention your name; it's trivially easy to not mention membership in a student organization. As such, including the membership signals 'I want you to know this' in a way the name doesn't.

Recent graduates are encouraged to mention involvement in student organizations when applying to jobs; leadership roles in those organizations might speak well of a candidate. People might also put this information on a résumé because they want to work somewhere where they know they will be welcome. I am a teacher and I would certainly mention on my résumé that I am the faculty advisor for the Gender/Sexuality Alliance (even if applying to an engineering position). I am proud of my involvement as faculty advisor, and I also would not want to work somewhere where my sexuality would be considered any sort of liability.

Rather than expect applicants to take measures to whitewash their résumés (which also gives an advantage to those applicants whose extracurriculars are already "generic," i.e. upper-class and white), it seems we should be educating employers to be aware of their biases when reading these résumés, and teaching strategies for overcoming them.

That sounds naive to me. How would you react if you had to decide about a resume and get one perfectly qualified listing a leadership role in a conservative/republican student organisation, like Young Americas Foundations which opposes mandatory lgbt sensitivity training? Would you think "what a great way to overcome my own biases!" or would you not prefer a resume aligning more with your views/background?

I can't speak for the exact source of jimmyswinny's frustration, but it seems to me that when you can be sued for discriminatory hiring policies your best defense is to never have had that information at all (no means => unsuccessful lawsuit).

Someone who deliberately and unnecessarily provides that information unasked for is puncturing that protection.

Now, I don't hire people, but this seems to me like a perfectly rational reason to be annoyed to know your applicants sexuality that has little to do with personal bias.

Instead of relying on applicant's to redact information that you don't want to see, why not have someone go through all of the applications and redact that information? You could even go as far as redacting information such as the applicant's name that it wouldn't be practical for the applicant to redact on their own.

Names can be blacked out as a matter of company policy; extracurriculars, not so much.

Why not?

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