Minority Candidates’ Job Offer Rejections and Subsequent Hiring Decisions

Despite legal and societal imperatives to increase the diversity of talent in the workplace, many organizations still struggle with organizational change in this regard. Prior research proposed overt resistance to diversity, and organizational norms and processes that serve to reinforce inequality, as two main mechanisms that inhibit change efforts. This study contributes to the latter work, by proposing that minority job candidates are more vulnerable to context-dependent penalties that arise as a consequence of a negative experience with another minority candidate during the hiring process. Our experiments are set up in context of a fictional technology start-up and designed as a high-pressure entrepreneurship game. In our first experiment, we show that decision-makers are less likely to make a hiring offer to an African American candidate with the same qualifications as the top white candidate, when they experienced a job offer rejection from another African American applicant, as compared to when the initial job offer did not reach the candidate due to an administrative error. We show that this penalty persists, even when the African American candidate in the second round is evaluated to have higher skill than the comparable white applicant, and when the decision maker is advised that the organization would like to prioritize . This study contributes to research on workplace diversity and inequality by identifying how an ostensibly race-neutral hiring process can give rise to prejudice against hiring racial minority candidates, as a result of a commonplace hiring process event (job offer rejection).