Are you a smarter potential-employee if you studied at Harvard than if you studied online?
Or maybe you are a better pick for the job if you made the hiring manager laugh.
Then there are people who might be good if their names were not so hard to pronounce.
All these, considerations play into hiring in the real world, even with companies and people who want to be open-minded.
Some CEOS have realized these biases are not only unfair, but they don't result in the best employees.
Enter blind hiring or blind auditions.
Here employers try to eliminate every single consideration except quality of work. They don't want to know your name, see your resume or even meet you.
One blind audition site, GapJumpers.com, hosts blind auditions for software engineering, design, marketing, and communication. According to site creator Petar Vujosevic, a company posts a job, and anyone at all that wants to apply simply takes on a proposed project, probably not a simple one, according to NPR.
Instead of companies eliminating those who went to the wrong college, for example, it is performance that wins.
Employers say blind hiring reveals true talents and results in diverse hires.
The rising interest in anonymous hiring reflects growing awareness of unconscious bias, attitudes or stereotypes that could affect decisions. Even a person's name can affect how they're viewed and subtly prompt managers to make unfair decisions, says The Wall Street Journal.
Tech-industry recruiter Aline Lerner saw firms ignore talented technologists if they lacked degrees from elite schools or experience with tech giants.
Lerner quit recruiting to build Interviewing Inc., a website that pairs interviewers with interviewees in chat rooms where they were encouraged to talk but not share their names.
