Hiring Discrimination and the Task Content of Jobs: Evidence from a Large-Scale R\'esum\'e Audit

Sharon Braun, Jonathan Bushnell, Zachary Cowell, David Dowling Samuel Goldstein, Andrew Johnson, George Miller, John M. Nunley, R. Alan Seals and Mingzhou Wang

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: We conducted a large-scale resume audit of 36,880 applications to 9,220 job advertisements for new college graduates across the United States. Firms express task preferences through job-advertisement text, which we link to occupation-level task measures from O*NET and the American Community Survey. We develop a model in which discrimination increases with evaluative discretion, defined as the share of hiring decisions driven by subjective rather than verifiable assessment. Callback gaps vary systematically with the task content of jobs. In management occupations, callbacks are 28 to 43 percent lower for Black men, Black women, White women, and Hispanic men than for otherwise identical White men. Broad occupation categories conceal important variation in task demands. When jobs are grouped by task intensity, discrimination concentrates in positions combining high analytical and interpersonal demands with low routine content. Decomposing task content into subjective-evaluation and objective-precision components, we find that subjective evaluation widens callback gaps while objective precision compresses them. Customer contact amplifies this divergence, widening gaps in non-routine jobs but not in routine jobs. Randomly assigned resume credentials that increase callbacks on average reduce gaps in low-discretion jobs but not in high-discretion jobs. Early-career exclusion from high-return task bundles may entrench long-run demographic gaps in employment outcomes.

Date: 2026-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.01933 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2604.01933

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().