By Clémence Noyer & Héléna Luparello
We chose to present a video called “adverse impact”. This video was made by Stephen B.Jeong who is an industrial-organizational psychologist. It’s a 10 minute presentation of IO psychology related topics. The targeted audience is people who work in human resources and organizational psychology and student in IO psychology.
This podcast highlights that if one particular group is highly represented in a company, this does not mean that adverse impact occurs. The diversity in a city population doesn’t have to be reflected in the company of the city, because not everyone will apply to the job so you can’t have the same diversity in the company.
The adverse impact is about fairness, means that a candidate should be hired if they are qualified to do the job, and not on other criterias. But as humans, we are affected by a lot of biases : we tend to like people who are the same as us, the beauty of the person affect us etc. So we tend to hire unqualified people but that we like. It also happens when companies focus on a particular group and/or this group is promoted at lower rate than other group. The adverse impact can be intentionally or unintentionally.
Rule that governs discrimination in the USA : “80% rule”
To illustrate this rule, we took qualified candidates from two different groups, one is dominant and the same amount of candidate are applying from each group. At the end we divided the percentage of the dominated group hired by the percentage of the dominant group hired. If this number is lower than 80 % the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) will investigate to know if adverse impact happened. If it is higher we can say that there is no adverse impact.
This author highlights through this video what companies could do to limit this discrimination. For example they could conduct regular Adverse Impact reviews on the procedure of recruitment, promotion… The company could also use valid tools : if you can justify with data that your screening process (your process helps to select people who will do well in the job) is valid you can justify AI. One way to do it is to convert your standard interview in structured interview.
Finally, the company could incorporate alternative screening tools like personality assessments.
To conclude, this video was good, it’s clear and explains well, but personally we didn’t learn anything concerning IO psychology but more on US law regarding adverse impact.
However, the advice given at the end can be very interesting as a lever for improvement regarding discrimination in hiring for people who work in human resources and organizational psychology.