When hiring for responsible positions, companies evaluate job candidates based on education, experience and a host of tangibles that factor into making one candidate stand out from the rest. That includes the face-to-face interview. But what if job applications are judged not just on what they say, but how they say it? A new study […]
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When hiring for responsible positions, companies evaluate job candidates based on education, experience and a host of tangibles that factor into making one candidate stand out from the rest.
That includes the face-to-face interview. But what if job applications are judged not just on what they say, but how they say it?
A new study by Yale researchers provides evidence that interviewers evaluate job candidates based on their social status — just seconds after they begin to speak.
The study, to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, demonstrates that people can accurately assess a person’s socioeconomic position — defined as income, education, and occupation status — based on brief speech patterns and shows that these perceptions influence hiring managers in ways that favor job applicants from higher socioeconomic strata.
“Our study shows that even during the briefest interactions, a person’s speech patterns shape the way people perceive them, including assessing their competence and fitness for a job,” said Michael Kraus, assistant professor of organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management. “While most hiring managers would deny that a job candidate’s social class matters, in reality, the socioeconomic position of an applicant or their parents is being assessed within the first seconds they speak — a circumstance that limits economic mobility and perpetuates inequality.”
The researchers based their findings on five separate studies. The first four examined the extent that people accurately perceive social class based on a few seconds of speech. They found that reciting seven random words is sufficient to allow people to discern the speaker’s social class with above-chance accuracy. They discovered that speech adhering to subjective standards for English as well as digital standards — i.e., the voices used in tech products like the Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant — is associated with both actual and perceived higher social class. The researchers also showed that pronunciation cues in an individual’s speech communicate their social status more accurately than the content of their speech.
“We rarely talk explicitly about social class, and yet, people with hiring experience infer competence and fitness based on socioeconomic position estimated from a few seconds of an applicant’s speech,” Kraus said. “If we want to move to a more equitable society, then we must contend with these ingrained psychological processes that drive our early impressions of others. Despite what these hiring tendencies may suggest, talent is not found solely among those born to rich or well-educated families. Policies that actively recruit candidates from all levels of status in society are best positioned to match opportunities to the people best suited for them.”
Kraus co-authored the paper with graduate students Brittany Torrez and Jun Won Park, and research associate Fariba Ghayebi.
