Anecdotally, I've been on the recruiting end of "anonimized" CVs pushed by outsourcing companies. I was never fully clear on whether this was a legal requirements for them, or if it was a gesture to show inclusiveness and social responsibility on their part (take this with a pinch of salt, most outsourcing companies in France are little better than horse-dealers and will push any warm body your way if they think they can turn a profit). At any rate, most of these were hilariously badly done: using initials for the last name but leaving the first name in full, leaving telling initials (1), or other subtle or less subtle ways to hint at the contractor's origin and gender.
(1) e.g. a first name initialed J.L., J.M. or some other variation points to a Jean-something (Jean-Louis, Jean-Michel, etc.) composite first name, which is a clear indication of a "native" Frenchman (and a hint as to the person's age as well)
It's still unclear whether the problem was with the implementation (the experiment) or the method.
If there's spooky action/unintuitive reality at play here it's the job of a good scientific study to pull it out and lay it bare.
Bias will exist regardless of which information you present, the most you can hope for is shifting and limiting the types of bias that come into play to eliminate useless or harmful bias. Even if you grant anonymity to the applicant, recruiters can still be biased against or in favor of the school somebody went to, what they studied, the organizations they were involved in, etc.
I get that it acts as a moderate signal of how tenacious and inherently able that applicant might have been in the past if she went to XYZ school or ABC company. But there will be so many false negatives!
A lot of folks who probably would be otherwise capable of the job at hand would be dismissed for not having the right pedigree. Also, past performance is not always the best Intuit if future success.
And then of course is the issue of how do you even define success, especially in case if university graduates. How does a Yale or Harvard define our measure success for its students... Probably in terms of potential impact they have on the world or how good their names may look on the rolls 10 years down the line.
A lot of the issues, especially in terms of job applicators but also applicable in admissions process, ultimately comes down to information and numeric asymmetry between the organisation and the applicant.
If there was a way to somehow capture the readings - however brief - for rejection or selection of applicants or a documented scoring methodology, that itself would bring a lot of change.
I would love to know if some resources to further explore the alternative models of applicant assessment which does not place as much importance on the past organisations / schools they have been to.
Any suggestions would be much appreciated
Adhere hiring decisions to defined generational imbalance correction mechanisms (in the US, "affirmative action"/EEOC/similar state laws).
The goal of these bindings are to remove inherent bias. Some of that is bred into the intercept defined by unchangeable characteristics. Others by the vector field of rewards return for effort, often defined by thar initial condition. The goal with most of these (apparently feared? do I have your emotion right?) corrections is to offset at least the most damning of these.
Perhaps what's most insidious about ascribing group victimhood is that you must also accept the converse, which is group responsibility. Are you suddenly going to be held responsible for any wrongs that your group has ever committed? Are you truly certain that's what you want?
You are ignoring that life is not fair, and never will be. We cannot control the bodies and circumstances we are born into. But every individual has the ability to make the most of their opportunity and achieve their goals, and quite a few in history have proven that they are able to accomplish far more by effort and will than any natural advantage otherwise. That is the best we can do, and unless you create some matrix world where we are all exactly equivalent clones of the same capacity, that is all that is possible.
It is important to note that the unfairness you describe doesn't affect the positive (non-normative) observations of bias-preservation that the blind hiring approach persists.
Now, pivoting to moral claims along the lines of your comment:
Discrimination has a long history, of which slavery, carting to reservations, redlining,and so forth favored certain groups consistently above others, in the past and in the present. In my view, repairing at least the present entrenched bias by any name is in order, the question is to what level. Autarky is a feasible outcome, if desired, which is to do nothing. The diffusion of favored and privileged status will always feel like discrimination to the group that had favored status. There is still a moral imperative to at least correct current entrenched bias, which in the US can show up in incarceration rates, ability to invest, etc.etc.
Unless you feel these groups that are historically and currently biased against are somehow responsible for their own situations? If that is the case, autarky or favoring your personal situation has a basis to build on. However, I fail to see how various denigrated groups through time brought their current biased outcomes. You've been shown evidence by other commentators that in the US blacks receive longer sentences than whites. Is that just how it is, or do we have as a society a moral imperative to fix at least the current system, let alone offer historical reparations?
Anyways, you didn't answer why people must be considered as groups instead of individuals? That seems to be the only lens you consider people, while also only choosing the group identity of the most perceived victimhood over an arbitrary time frame. And again, if you want to say that someone takes on the wrongs experienced by a group, then they must also take responsibility for the wrongs committed by the group. So in your example about US blacks, that group also commits the majority of crimes so they must acknowledge and resolve that too. Are you prepared to say that?
You're changing the argument into something about morality but the reality is that there is no cosmic justice. You can be born with missing limbs, or to a destitute family, or inside North Korea. The best we can do is make sure that if you work hard (and yes, harder than others who might be born to a billionaire US family) that you get the same exact chance to gain a position because you are actually competent and qualified for it, and what you look like and what some group in the past has done has absolutely nothing to do with that.
The question is whether the school is offering a harmful bias -- people get screened by school, GPA, etc all the time but at the point that society agrees these are harmful then you can just anonymize them out. It gets murkier on the moral/ethical side but I think that's the nature of the problem, not a problem with the solution.
I say this as someone who won the "game" on every count with this. Near-perfect SAT score, perfect high school performance, 100% acceptance rate into the Ivies (Harvard, Columbia, Penn, Cornell).
These say nothing about me other than my parenting, background and ability to win games that other people made up. Any intelligence or ability or skill or discipline that I have is in spite of those things, not because of them.
A common game bosses make up: "impress me with growth in this KPI by next quarter"
Rather than proving it is laughable, you are instead giving the exact reason why (under a certain value system) it makes lots of sense to select for this ability.
Going more meta, starting a median VC-backed company in the Valley is largely playing the same kind of game as in elite private schools and colleges - observing a social scene, identifying powerful players and the ladder to reach them, meticulously performing the necessary social roles in order to achieve funding, cargo cult management styles from the group.
Politics about bias and diversity aside, if your goal was to objectively disable people from being biased, the simplest solution always seemed to be to remove their ability to apply any of their biases.