Are You One of Us?: Current Hiring Practices Suggest the Potential for Class Biases in Large Tech Companies

To better understand how we can broaden participation in computing, this exploratory study examines the interview process for elite internships at established technology companies. Through conducting 36 interviews with evaluators at technology companies, we find that in addition to technical competence, evaluators often assess internship applicants based on explicit and implicit signals of industrial fit, organizational fit, and individual fit. These evaluative criteria are reminiscent of prior literature linking biases in hiring to social class background. By reflecting on how our findings relate to previous studies, we suggest that evaluators’ assessments of fit are potentially linked to social class background, and this might be an invisible factor contributing to hiring biases at technology companies. Given that hiring only culturally similar employees can have negative individual, organizational, and societal consequences, we propose strategies for evaluators to broaden their evaluation perspectives and to enact inclusive interviewing practices. We conclude with a call for further research on the role of social class background in hiring.