The Role Of Race In Interviews

First impressions can mean the difference between getting a life changing job, or continuing to surf the ever changing wave of unemployment. Racial biases can dictate whether a person is even considered for a job or not, even though they might have the same skillset as someone else. Affect heuristic is a mental shortcut used when people have to make quick decisions, based on their current emotion. How does this play a role in interviews? Can race cause the interviewee to overlook the great qualities an applicant has to offer just because of the color of their skin? In interviews, people generally give higher ratings to applicants of the same race (Byrd). Race is generally known as physical features that separate groups of people. They seemed to separate the white applicants more apart from each other based on characteristics, whereas the blacks were almost all put into one, “average” category (Byrd). If the job required a high performing employee, whites were chosen over blacks (Byrd). Does this mean blacks are not capable of the same thing that whites are? Of course not. But in that short amount of interview time, the interviewee put people, depending on their race, into categories about work ability, just from the color of their skin. …show more content…
If they are applying for a company that values diversity, they do not change their résumés very much (Kang). However if they do not value diversity, they will try to avoid discrimination by hiding or minimizing their racial cues (Kang). It is almost as if they are trying to conceal their race, because affect heuristic in interviews is real. They are afraid of an employer judging their assets based on their race, so they have to hide their racial differences when applying for a job, No one should have to hide who they are in order to get