Disabilities and the selection interview: discrimination and disclosure

Discrimination against people with disabilities seems still to be present in employment selection, but I was interested to read this week that not all disabilities are considered equal in the eyes of prospective employers. When compared to candidates without disabilities, candidates with physical disabilities tend to be rated most favourably in job interviews, with the highest employability ratings and the highest number of job offers.  The next most highly rated group are candidates with sensory impairments, and the least likely to be given a job offer are those with psychological disorders. This, I guess, reflects the stigma still very much associated with mental ill health and the lack of understanding and awareness that is so widespread in society.

Disclosure – whether to and when to disclose a disability can be a tricky decision. Some with a hidden disability prefer not to disclose at all to prevent the negative attitudes and discrimination that they feel is inevitably associated. Others prefer to disclose upfront, not wanting to drag themselves through a stressful process only to be rejected when their disability finally emerges. You might feel that you stand more of a chance of getting the job if you don’t disclose until after the job offer is in the bag, but you then risk starting a working relationships with your new manager on the wrong foot, as they may feel resentment at being misled.

Clients often ask advice on this tricky issue, and I've always felt a bit lost as to how to best answer their questions, but I've now found a few bits of evidence in the academic literature that can help me.

Candidates with visible disabilities (most studies have been conducted with wheelchair users) tend to do better in interviews if they make some verbal reference to the disability during the interview, but interviewers are more comfortable if this reference is made towards the end of the interview. Candidates with a non-visible disability are rated more highly in terms of how qualified they are and how likable they are if they disclose their disability at the start of the interview rather than at the end. 

It's interesting that there is such a clear distinction between what goes down well if your disability is visible, and what goes down well if it's not. It seems that an employer's primary consideration is that they do not want to feel that they've been misled, anything to do with how socially confomfortable they feel is secondary. A candidate in a wheelchair is hardly going to be accused of misleading an employer so the employer can then go to their second consideration, which is that they feel more comfortable discussing the disability after they have developed some kind of relationship with the candidate first. With an invisible disability, the employer is most concerned with whether or not they feel that they have been misled, and not mentioning the disability until the end of the discussion, is liable to make the employer feel that that have been duped in some way.

I don't think that I would give this information to a client in the form of advice (I seem to be pretty much against advice in most professional situations!) but I think the information could be really useful and empowering to clients as they reach their own conclusions.

The Golden Handshake?

Just a short one this time. I'm delighted to have found a paper that looks at the handshake in interviews and what impact handshakes have on interview outcomes!

The handshake does make a difference to your chances of getting a job offer. First of all, a handshake is more likely to lead to a positive employer rating than no handshake. But a good handshake is the best of all. A 'good' handshaker is one whose grip is full and firm, whose shake is vigorous and lasts some time and who maintains eye contact with the other person throughout.
Employers who receive this kind of desirable handshake are more likely to think the candidate is likable, warm and better qualified to do the job, and they are likely to think that they would be more satisfied with their choice if they hired this candidate.
Now that perhaps isn't a great surprise - we all know that employers (indeed, all of us) make judgments based on all sorts of nonverbal cues that aren't related to the job description.

Here's the bit that surprised me.

Handshakes actually are related to certain personality traits that are in turn linked to people's abilities to perform certain roles. A 'good' handshake correlates with an individual's degree of extraversion, emotional expressiveness, emotional stability and social confidence.

So then one final point which is about gender. There is a psychological concept of 'positive deviation'. This occurs when someone is particularly highly credited for doing something that they are not expected to do. In this case, women are not generally expected to give 'good' handshakes, so if they do, the employer gives them a particularly positive rating.

So, I'm not sure what that says about the validity and fairness of our selection procedures, but it's a great thing to be able to teach your nervous students as they prepare for their job interviews.

CVs - what do we think we know? And why do we think we know it?

One of the most popular services that career coaches offer is help with constructing a winning CV. And for some reason, there is a desire in clients, policy makers and practitioners to be a little more directive when it comes to CVs. Perhaps this is an arena where people imagine there are hard and fast rules, and see the career coach as the holder of the knowledge. Or perhaps it's a more practical issue that there tends to be quite a demand for this service and stakeholders are keen to capitalise on this popularity by treating it as an 'easy win'.

My philoshophical stance on this is that there is no more reason to be directive when it comes to CV checks than for any other career query, but I can quite accept that others don't share my view. What I do find curious is that although it's the one area that we seem to feel most confident about telling clients what to do, it's probably the one area where there is least empirical evidence to back our directions up.
There is, for example, loads of empirical evidence about what makes people happy at work, but most practitioners wouldn't dream of saying 'now I don't think you should apply for that job because there isn't much autonomy and so it's not going to make you happy'. We just wouldn't. But, we do seem happy to say 'I don't think you should include your Primary School education on this CV'. Even though there is PLENTY of empirical evidence that autonomy makes you happy at work, and NO evidence that inclusion of Primary school education scuppers your chances of getting an interview.

Anyway, I've been digging around the published studies about CVs and it's been quite surprising. The first surprising thing is that there is so very little published about this. I've found perhaps 20 or 30 papers published in peer reviewed journals, but over the course of the last 20 years, it hardly seems to be a hot topic. And if I thought it was sparse for CVs, the evidence on cover letters is much more scarce - I could only find one single study that explored what kinds of cover letters lead to interview. And of course, as usual, most of the research was conducted within the US, and most of it was based on the job searches of final year undergraduates (a very over-researched group because they are so easy for academics to survey) which is interesting, but not necessarily generalisable to all contexts.

The next striking finding for me, is that what employers think they like in a CV, is different from what they actually base their decisions on. There have been a few studies that have shown this, studies where the researchers have questioned the employers on what they base their decisions on, and then analysed the CVs that had actually been shortlisted, and looked at what made them stand out. In one study (Cole et al 1994) the employers said that they based their decisions on work experience and academic qualifications. In practice these employers actually shortlisted people based on their extra-curricular activities, and furthermore, the higher the academic qualification, the less likely a candidate was to be invited for interview. Other studies have shown that there is little interrater reliability in employers' views on CVs (ie two different people looking at the same CV, with the same job description in mind, are likely to end up with very different opinions on the candidate), and that employers make, generally pretty inaccurate judgments about candidates' personalities, based on the facts in the CV.

This mismatch between what recruiters say they do, and what they actually do I think is particularly interesting given that there are hundreds of books and articles purporting to give quality advice on CVs published every year. Many of these are written by people who have had little or no genuine credibility within this arena (and yes, I talk as someone who has written many articles and even book chapters on CVs, but have done only a small amount of recruitment from CVs myself, and until recently, had read none of the good quality research on the subject), and even the best of the books base their advice on the author's own experience of shortlisting from CVs, and on advice from other employers.

This is all another symptom for me, of the huge gulf that exists between academics and practitioners. Why are academics not publishing more about the topics that concern practitioners? And why are practitioners not basing their practice on the research? And I'm not sure what the answer is. Do University Careers Services need to become more like other University departments, where they are expected to produce research themselves? This would certainly make sure that practitioners are closer to the research, but quite where they would get the time, I'm not sure.... Any ideas?

How do I love thee? Let me count the Js

I've just read a paper that I found quite astounding. My first reaction was to check the date of publication to make sure it wasn't April 1st. My second was to feel al bit overwhelmed about how little I seem to still know about how we make career decisions. And my third was to start to feel that as career professionals we're up against it as we try to influence the career decision making processes of our clients.

The paper was by Ansel and Duyck, Implicit Letter Preferences in Job Choice,and was published in the Journal of Psychology (1999, Vol 143 (2)). It's based on something called 'name-letter' preference and this is the quite well evidenced finding that we have a preference for things that include the letters in our own names, in particular the initial letters. This preference has been shown to have quite an impact on all sorts of life decisions, such as where you choose to live (suggesting that it's no coincidence that my friend Viriginia lives in Virginia Water) and who you marry.

This paper was looking at the impact this name-letter preference on job choice. It illustrated first that within certain professions there is a higher incidence of people with similar sounding names: apparently, there are an unusual number of dentists called Dennis.
They also conducted some experiments to see what kind of organisations people are more likely to apply for, and found that people say that they are more likely to want to apply to organisations whose names are similar to their own. They conducted one experiment where they made up names of organisations that sounded very much like the participant's name showing for example, that a participant called Kelly, was more drawn to an organisation called Kelokoa nd another using names of real organisations, and showed, for example, that a participant called Jack would be likely to be drawn to a company such as Johnson's or John Lewis.
These effect size was small - the researchers are not suggesting that this is the main basis of most people's career decisions. But the effect is pretty consistent and does make a difference.

So what do we as practitioners do with this kind of information? Well, in truth, the effect size isn't big enough for us to worry too much about. But it makes me thoughtful about two different aspects of our practice. First it suggests that we still have very little understanding of how we make career decisions - for all the decades of research that has gone into the field, we're still nowhere near a complete understanding. The more I read about the research, the more irrelevant the safe and straightforward world of Holland's matching theories, but nothing as comprehensive and easy to understand has emerged to take its place. My second concern is about the huge impact that the unconcsious has on our decision making. Not that I'm suggesting that the unconsious has no part to play in the career decision making processes, but I just struggle to see exactly how our traditional practices can help. Our standard line is to address career issues at a conscious and rational level, but how can we compete with these kinds of unconscious processes that we are quite unaware of, and can't control?

Do you want a pay rise? Here's how...

Judge and Cable in the Journal of Applied Pscyhology last year (2011 vol 96) found some evidence to confirm all my worst fears about the relationship between women's weight and the workplace. Thin (by which I mean actively, unhealthily, under-weight) women, it seems, are paid significantly more than women at a healthy weight. The evidence suggests that for men, their pay tends to go up as their weight goes up, until their weight reaches obesity, when pay levels off and then decreases. For women, their pay goes down as their weight goes up, and does this particularly rapdily between 'thin' and 'average'. What is particularly striking about this study is that some of the data came from within-individuals. So as well as looking at the population as a whole (thin women tend to earn more than average women), they traced participants' earnings and weight throughout their careers, showing that as an individual woman's weight goes up and down, so her salary, correspondingly, is likely to go down and up.

Their explanation is all about the social desirability of body shapes. While men are thought to be undesirable both when they are too thin and too fat, a larger man, within the bounds of a healthy weight, is accorded more respect in the workplace. In contrast, for women, being actively thin is most socially desired and best rewarded.

Guilt can make you a better mother

Guilt is an emotion I don't have much time for. I'm all for people behaving well, but most of the time guilt serves no purpose except to lower your self-esteem, and more often than not, its provenance is some ridiculous social stereotype that you're not quite managing to live up to, or some idealised image you have in your mind of what you think other people expect.

But in the latest edition of the Journal of Vocational Behavior (which is mostly devoted to issues of work-life conflict and has loads of great articles), Cho and Allen have written a really interesting paper which suggests that guilt can lead to better parenting. In this study, the researchers looked at a group of over-worked, over-stressed parents and found (surprise surprise) that they spent less time actively playing with their children at the weekends than parents whose lives were stress free. But this effect was moderated by the parents' pre-dispostions to guilt. We each of us have a certain degree to which we are pre-disposed to feelings of guilt - some people become wracked with guilt at the mere sight of a piece of chocolate cake, or a forgotten birthday, whereas for others, it takes something pretty serious to get those guilty feelings started. The research suggested that although over-work normally leads to you playing less with your kids at the weekend, the guilt-ridden, stress-out parents still manage a good dose of what the researchers call "recreational and educational games".

Quite how that leaves time to put your feet up and read the paper, I don't know, but at least it's one less thing to feel guilty about.

Too much information?

Following on from my recent obsession with decision making, I've shifted a bit now to look at the bit before the decision - the bit where we try to make sense of all the information that we know.

The information we get about careers is huge, complex and quite daunting when you stop to think about it. We are fed information about different jobs, occupations, industries, and the economy at large from all different quarters a hundred times a day. Each time we contact a call centre, buy stamps from the post office or book an appointment with our GP we are feeding, confusing and expanding our knowledge of the world of work. So how do we start to make sense of it all?

We've developed quite a few clever tricks to help us cope. Some of them useful, and some of them perhaps less so.

We have developed a few unconscious strategies for dealing with the sheer volume of information. One strategy is  to focus in on a subset of occupations, making  a swift, ill-informed decision to look at jobs in, say, the media and then starting to do some more in depth research to decide between TV production and advertising. Alternatively we go for a single factor, and research that widely, for example, jobs with high starting salaries which could lead us to a choice between law and banking. We can become overwhelmed with choices, and as information increases, our awareness goes down. When the information goes beyond what we can manage we will restrict the processing that we do, to avoid cognitive stress.

We don’t always evaluate the information that we get with the cold, critical eye of an MI5 agent. ‘Hot’ information is much more appealing to us than ‘cold’ information. This is traditionally something that has been particularly associated with people from working class backgrounds, but it now seems clear that this effect is shown across all groups. Hot information is stuff you hear from people you know. Cold information comes from more formal sources such as government websites and career books. In career terms, we’re much more likely to base our view of how easy it is to make a success of a new business venture based on Uncle Bob’s thriving business, than on BIS’s website which states that 90% of new businesses fold within two years.

Occupational information tends to be gleaned from different sources, which will often provide different information, presented in different ways. When comparing occupations (or indeed other options), therefore you will often not have comparable information. You may, for example, know the starting salaries for all occupations you’re looking into, but only the levels of autonomy for one, and the typical hours worked for another. Factors which you can compare directly are given more weight in your mental calculations than others, regardless of how important the factors are to you. So in this case, even though autonomy might be the single most important factor to you, the conclusions you would draw from your research would be based principally on the starting salaries, because that is the one that you can compare directly.

I'm sure there are lots of other heuristics and short cuts that we take and I'll report back as I find out more. I think this is all really useful for us as coaches to know. The more that we understand about the way our minds work, the more we can work with our clients to help them to identify what information they should highlight and what to play down.