Item — HN Reader

Eric Ries claims to have had "shocking" results when having recruiters remove all demographics from resumes. His suggestion for YC:

I suggest the following experiment: for your next batch of admissions, have half of your reviewers use a blind screening technique and the other half use your standard technique, on your first screen (before you’ve met any applicants). Compare the outputs of both selection processes. I predict they will show different demographics.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/19/racism-and-meritocracy/

Obviously YC needs to interview applicants, but as it already cuts people before the first interview, it might be an interesting experiment.

2 comments

We see them at the application stage too, because the application includes a video. The video tells us a lot more than their race and sex. So if half the people reading applications didn't see the video, we'd do a lot worse at reading applications.

I do not think YC wants to do an experiment for the sake of experimenting because YC is an experiment in itself. Seems like many commenting are missing the his point. The pool of applicants seems to come from those who gain access to computers at an early age. Unfortunately, minorities don't get this early access to computing, therefore, very few applicants are minorities. This has little to do with race and color and more to do with the level of interest of the person, but again, this tails back to how early a person comes in contact with a computer.