I have come to believe that businesses have a lot of the most interesting and useful data around. Here is yet another example of how, with the right data, an incredibly simple analysis can make an important point in an extremely convincing way.
JobApp Network helps other companies to hire. Applications can be made either over the phone or online. Edgar Johns, an employee at JobApp Network, analyzed data his company had on over 25,000 applicants to restaurant and retail job positions.
Looking at means in the data, he found something striking. Of those job seekers applying by phone, more than 40 percent were minorities. When it came to applying over the web, the share of minorities fell to less than 20 percent. His conclusion: as firms move more and more toward taking only online applications, there could be an adverse impact on minority applicants.
You can read the whole analysis here.
I’ve heard people argue this point without data before, but I’ve never been convinced. While minorities, overall, do have less high-speed internet access at home, it would seem conceivable that internet access would not be that different among the types of people applying for similar jobs. Also, in principle, access to internet at places outside the home (e.g. schools or libraries) might be sufficient.
Data make the point in a way conjecture and anecdote cannot.
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“Of those job seekers applying by phone, more than 40 percent were minorities. When it came to applying over the web, the share of minorities fell to less than 20 percent.”
I don’t think that’s quite correct. The data seems to say this:
More than 40% of the sampled minorities chose to apply over the phone.
Less than 20% of the sampled non-minorities chose to apply over the internet.
There are approximately the same number of minorities and non-minorities, so, according to the data, ~67% of all phone applicatants are minorities, and ~40% of all internet applicants are minorities.
Same trends, nonetheless.
One possible explanation I’ve heard: when employers see an unusual name on an internet application, they are less likely to select that person out of fear of mispronouncing the name. They want to avoid the embarrassment of having to struggle with the name, but as a result those minorities aren’t hired.
I hire people and our hiring front door is the Internet. So we don’t know who is or isn’t minority. What we do know is that a lot of people can’t spell or use proper grammar- these people have no chance at being hired for customer service jobs.
Though this does show that minorities are not using the internet to apply for positions, it does not show why. If this company wants to truely make a point, they need to add questions that would define why they chose that method. They need to add markers for what their access to the internet/phone is (public, family, communal). This would better clarify the data at hand. As well what is the ratio of internet:phone for those applicants that didn’t state sex or race.
I just assisted more than 10 people in filling out either a paper or online application for an entry-level federal job. It was extremely frightening to see how different people interpreted the paper form. I don’t think one person filled in all the required blanks, let alone placed the right info in those blanks.
Online, at least the form couldn’t be submitted without all of the fields being entered. In this case, I think the minority applicants were more likely to use the computer.
Is remedial form-filling-in taught in high school? I really felt for these folks, but understood why they probably were entry-level despite their various ages.
If minorities are more likely to live in areas where the library and school don’t have internet access, well, this isn’t a shock.
It might be instructive to have broken them down into different minority groups rather than collapsing it all into a broad label “minority.” We can then see if this analysis reflects different opportunities (like Carolyn said, if they are less likely to have internet, that’s to be expected). Or, we could see if the conditions of rational discrimination apply; in which non-Asian minorities who have benefited from affirmative action are logically viewed as less desirable applicants than those with identical paper qualifications.
Seems to me that data indicates a general preference of minorities to apply by phone. I’m not sure why we jump to the conclusion that minorities apply by phone because they can’t apply over the internet. The data doesn’t support that conclusion. In fact, that conclusion seems a little racist.