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

TL;DR

This study analyzes hiring discrimination through a large resume audit, linking job task content to demographic callback gaps, and finds discrimination varies with task complexity and evaluative discretion.

Contribution

It introduces a model connecting task content and evaluative discretion to discrimination, revealing how subjective evaluation widens gaps especially in high-discretion jobs.

Findings

Callback gaps are 28-43% lower for minorities in management roles.

Discrimination concentrates in jobs with high analytical and interpersonal demands.

Subjective evaluation widens callback gaps, while objective precision reduces them.

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.