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Reducing discrimination against job seekers with and without employment gaps

Nature Human Behaviour volume 7, pages 211–218 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Past research shows that decision-makers discriminate against applicants with career breaks. Career breaks are common due to caring responsibilities, especially for working mothers, thereby leaving job seekers with employment gaps on their résumés. In a preregistered audit field experiment in the United Kingdom (n = 9,022), we show that rewriting a résumé so that previously held jobs are listed with the number of years worked (instead of employment dates) increases callbacks from real employers compared to résumés without employment gaps by approximately 8%, and with employment gaps by 15%. A series of lab studies (an online pilot and two preregistered experiments; n = 2,650) shows that this effect holds for both female and male applicants—even when compared to applicants without employment gaps—as well as and for applicants with less and more total job experience. The effect is driven by making the applicant’s job experience salient, not as a result of novelty or ease of reading.

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Fig. 1: Callback rates by condition.

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Data availability

Data for all studies are available at https://osf.io/3gahc/?view_only=a8188dc8f9e8473e8722fd57b92484ba.

Code availability

Code for all studies is available at https://osf.io/3gahc/?view_only=a8188dc8f9e8473e8722fd57b92484ba.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the Behavioural Insights Team for their research design and implementation of the field experiment, including substantial contributions from V. Roy-Chowdhury and T. Hardy. We are also grateful to A. Sutherland from the Behavioural Insights Team for his help as well. This study was supported by the UK Government Equalities Office (to BIT’s Gender and Behavioural Insights (GABI) programme), the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant No. PR00P1_193128 to J.L.G.) and the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship (grant No. MR/T020253/1 to O.P.H.). The funders had no role in the design of the study, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Management Division, Columbia Business School, New York, NY, USA

    Ariella S. Kristal

  2. Behavioural Insights Team, London, UK

    Leonie Nicks

  3. School of Management, University of St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland

    Jamie L. Gloor

  4. Department of Economics, University of Exeter Business School, Exeter, UK

    Oliver P. Hauser

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  1. Ariella S. Kristal
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  2. Leonie Nicks
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  3. Jamie L. Gloor
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  4. Oliver P. Hauser
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Contributions

L.N. designed the intervention and field experiment; A.S.K. and O.P.H. input into the field experiment and designed the online experiments; A.S.K. performed the online experiment research; A.S.K. analysed the data; and all authors wrote the paper.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Ariella S. Kristal or Oliver P. Hauser.

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Competing interests

L.N. is employed by the Behavioural Insights Team. The rest of the authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Human Behaviour thanks Christopher Bryan, Eva Van Belle and Sunčica Vujić for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Figs. 1–3, Tables 1–9 and Additional details.

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Kristal, A.S., Nicks, L., Gloor, J.L. et al. Reducing discrimination against job seekers with and without employment gaps. Nat Hum Behav 7, 211–218 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01485-6

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