Job Testing Does Not Harm Minorities’ Hiring Prospects
The use of standardized tests in hiring practices has been criticized as racially biased, or at least as a hurdle for equal opportunity hiring programs. A paper published in MIT’s latest Quarterly Journal of Economics challenges this view.
David Autor, associate professor of economics at MIT, who conducted the study with David Scarborough of Black Hills State University, puts the question in blunt terms: “Job testing has the potential to raise productivity by improving the quality of matches between workers and firms. But because of the near-universal finding that minorities fare relatively poorly on standardized tests, there is a pervasive concern that better candidate selection comes at a cost of reduced opportunity for groups with lower average test scores.”
The study’s authors “studied hiring and job longevity among primarily high school-educated workers who were paid hourly wages for customer-service jobs in the private sector. The researchers relied on data from a national retail firm whose 1,363 stores switched from informal, paper-based screening to computer-supported, test-based screening over the course of one year.”
“Access to this data gave us the unique opportunity to evaluate the effects of job testing on minorities in a competitive business environment,” the authors said.
“Consistent with previous research, minority applicants performed significantly worse on the electronic employment test. But the researchers detected no change in the racial composition of hires once electronic screening was installed. Moreover, the authors found, productivity gains were equally large among minority and majority hires.”
The findings are significant because the outcomes do not support the accepted belief that minorities’ relatively low scores on standardized tests mean that such tests harm the job prospects of minority workers.
The findings strongly suggest that companies are fully capable of - and willing to - factor in equal opportunity program goals when screening by testing data.
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