Those without ‘seamless’ job histories face hiring bias

People whose employment histories include part-time, temporary help agency or mismatched work can face challenges during the hiring process, according to new research.

When hiring managers review job applications, they must make rapid assessments about who they think is a good candidate for a position. But those evaluations are especially critical towards applicants whose employment histories differ from conventional notions of what a “good” job is, according to new research by David Pedulla, associate professor of sociology at Stanford University.

His research also reveals how those judgments vary considerably by an applicant’s race and gender. For example, black men with seamless job histories had almost identical callback rates as white men who were unemployed for a full year.

Here, Pedulla discusses some of these findings that he recently published in his new book, Making the Cut: Hiring Decisions, Bias, and the Consequences of Nonstandard, Mismatched, and Precarious Employment (Princeton University Press, 2020), an in-depth examination into how hiring professionals evaluate and treat workers with atypical employment histories—in other words, the type of work histories that will become more common as a result of the current COVID-19 pandemic:

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