Study examines how bias affects hiring practices

Removing bias from the hiring process presents challenges for the hospitality industry and other service industries that want a qualified, diverse workforce. New research from Cornell University shows that hiring managers' awareness of competence among job applicants and managers' positive attitudes toward affirmative action programs help reduce prejudice in recruitment. The study, - Do you look like me? How bias affects affirmative action in hiring ,' is available from the Cornell Center for Hospitality Research. It was written by Alex M. Susskind, an associate professor at School of Hotel Administration ; Ozias A. Moore, an assistant professor of management at Lehigh University; and Beth Livingston, an assistant professor at the ILR School. The report suggests that for organizations trying to improve the diversity profile of their workers, knowing the race of an applicant may help managers create a pool of desired applicants. But caution is required to prevent same-race bias or cross-race bias from becoming part of the hiring process. One approach to offset this effect is to recruit diverse candidates and add a blind evaluation component to the process to ensure that race is used to include, rather than exclude, qualified minority applicants, the researchers said.