The Substance of Style: How Social Class-Based Styles of Interpersonal Interaction Shape Hiring Assessments at Large Technology Companies

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Individuals’ social class background shapes their life experiences and outcomes, including their familial upbringing and educational attainment. However, we know little about how social class background influences the hiring practices of professional settings, and specifically, the ways in which evaluators conceptualize a potential link between social class background and hiring. Through interviewing 50 evaluators at large technology companies, we find that only 19 of them discussed how social class background affects applicants’ access to resources, and none articulated the ties between social class background and preferred interpersonal interactional styles. This is particularly troubling because all evaluators described assessing the key hiring criteria of “innovation potential” based on whether applicants display what we term a “transboundary interactional style.” This style involves demonstrating an ease with articulating cross-disciplinary ideas as well as facilitating back-and-forth scholarly conversations and debates. While evaluators characterized this style as stemming from applicants’ individual personalities, we draw on past sociological literature to suggest that this style is also cultivated in upper-middle-class environments. Given technology companies’ expressed desire to hire a diverse workforce by minimizing biases in evaluators’ assessments, we conclude with ideas for evaluators to develop more equitable hiring practices.