What’s in a name? Simon Henthorn

Moving on What’s in a name?

Simon Henthorn asks whether your school’s recruitment processes are robust enough to combat unconscious discrimination

When recruiting for any role, a school will be looking to appoint the best candidate. Evidence suggests, however, that unconscious bias can creep into the recruitment process when the employer is sifting through application forms or CVs and shortlisting candidates for interview.

There has been a lot of discussion in the press recently about the influence your name can have on your chances when applying for a job. In his speech to the Conservative party conference in September, David Cameron revealed that people with ‘white-sounding’ names are nearly twice as likely to get called back for job interviews as people with ‘ethnic-sounding’ names, despite having exactly the same qualifications.

He gave the example of Jorden Berkeley, a black university graduate from London, who was told by a careers adviser to include her middle name, Elizabeth, on job applications, an approach which proved successful. The National Bureau of Economic Research in America produced a study that showed that applicants with ‘white-sounding’ names only had to make ten job applications to get one call back, whereas those with ‘ethnic-sounding’ names had to make 15. Another study showed that certain names can have positive or negative implications. For example, people thought Margaret and Ron would be ‘hardworking’, but that Ace would be ‘a jerk’.

Figures from the School Workforce in England 2014 survey revealed that in state schools in England 87.5% of teachers are white British, as are 93.7% of head teachers, 86.6% of teaching assistants and 87.2% of non-classroom based support staff. A number of organisations, including Teach First, the Civil Service, local government, learndirect, HSBC, Deloitte, Virgin Money, KPMG, BBC and the NHS have pledged to use ‘name blind recruitment’ for graduate positions. This means that candidates will not be asked to provide their name when completing job application forms.

Job applicants are protected against unlawful discrimination. If an employer eliminates a job applicant at any stage of the recruitment process because of, for example, their race, gender, religion or age, this will amount to unlawful direct discrimination. The job applicant can bring an employment tribunal claim and receive compensation, which could include loss of earnings as well as an award for injury to feelings. It is similarly unlawful to discriminate when offering school places.

Name blind recruitment reduces the risk of unconscious race discrimination, but only at the shortlisting stage. If a candidate makes it through to the interview stage, there is a still a risk of unconscious or, indeed, conscious bias creeping in at that point. If that’s the case anyway, why bother with name blind recruitment?

Well, it can help in defending discrimination claims. Employment tribunals are entitled to draw inferences of unlawful discrimination if the facts before them justify this. For example, if a white candidate and a black candidate have exactly the same qualifications, but the white candidate is called for interview and the black candidate is rejected outright, the employment tribunal is entitled to infer that the reason for the difference in treatment is race.

However, if names are omitted from the application form so that the employer does not have any indication of the candidates’ race, then there is no basis on which the tribunal can draw an inference that race was the reason. For the same reason, employers do not generally ask for a candidate’s date of birth on the application form.

Many employers will argue that if they do not know a person’s name, they will not be able to carry out background checks before interview. However schools should not be carrying out background checks at this point: background checks should only be carried out on the successful candidate once the school is ready to make them an offer which would be conditional on the results of such checks being satisfactory.

It has also become increasingly common for employers to check out a candidate’s Facebook profile or their Twitter account before inviting them to interview, which they obviously can’t do if they don’t have their name. However this is not good recruitment practice either and is not recommended. Selection for a job should be based purely on the information provided by the candidate during the application and assessment process and during interview.

There are other ways in which schools can seek to reduce the risk of unconscious bias creeping into their selection processes. Many graduate recruitment systems already use computerised systems for the initial sifting of job applications. The computer system analyses whether candidates meet the selection criteria and, if they do not, they cannot progress to the next stage. In these situations, early sifting of applications has absolutely nothing to do with an applicant’s name.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission’s Code of Practice recommends that:

Wherever possible, more than one person should be involved in shortlisting candidates, to reduce the risk of one individual’s bias prejudicing an application. The marking system, including any cut-off score for selection, should be agreed before applications are assessed, and applied consistently to all applications. Each person should mark the applications separately before agreeing on a final mark. Selection should be based only on information provided in the application forms. The weight given to each item in the person specification should not be changed during shortlisting.

Name blind recruitment is not a silver bullet but it may help to reduce discrimination risks. It is certainly something that schools may wish to consider as part of a wider review of their recruitment processes.

Simon Henthorn is head of education at Doyle Clayton, specialist employment lawyers.