Week 3 Discussion
Answer the following questions
1. In hiring, what is worse, a false negative or a false positive? When might we decide to try to make great efforts to reduce false-negative decisions? When might we especially try to reduce false-positive decisions, even if it means increasing the number of false negatives?
2. Define stereotype threat. How does it create unfairness and discrimination in the workplace? Has it been supported by research as a real phenomenon?
3. Find an example of recruitment through a social media site. Discuss who the target demographic likely is, the advantages and disadvantages of using this medium for the recruitment of talent, and how the recruitment message might differ if presented in a different outlet (whether a different social media site or in a more traditional medium)
Week 3 Discussion: False Negative or a False Positive
According to various interviewers, false positive is even worse than false negatives. It is so because false positive refers to the condition when the hiring manager or HR professional tends to hire non-qualified personnel for the job role which may bring down the company’s growth rate and affect the overall business in long-term aspects. Although false negative refers to when a candidate who had been the best employee underperforms in some personality tests or interviews which pushes the organizational managers to decline their applications and move ahead with the new ones (MacMillan, 2020). However, the false positive is worse because in this case, the overall organizational growth will be impacted in all manners.
Moreover, to make sure that their current employees will stay with them for a longer time and perform superbly in interviews and personality tests so that the organization can reduce the chances of false negative hiring, the business owners are required to follow some of the tactics. It includes assisting the candidates in preparing for the tests and examinations, asking the questions straightforwardly, clearly telling them the hiring process, and more. On the other hand, to reduce false positives, the organization should try beforehand to conduct interviews to improve their talent management team so that they can be able to hire better people who are well for the job roles (Eva, 2018).
According to Steel & Aronson, the stereotype threat is the fear of an individual that their actions or words are supporting the negative ideas of the group they belong to. Just, for example, an individual might fear that their bad performance in the examination might confirm the negative beliefs of other people based on race, gender, ethnicity, and culture (Heaning, 2022). The stereotype threat is also dangerous because it does not affect an individual but instead a society as a whole. Moreover, stereotype threats have a very bad and negative effect not only on individuals and society instead on workplaces and organizations too.
With the stereotype threat, organizations may observe conflict between management and employees, low employee morale, litigation, lower production levels, and more. Furthermore, stereotypes have arisen from individuals’ minds, either in conscious or unconscious ways, and can lead to prejudices among the employees and can also develop different remarks about sex, gender, politics, race, etc (BHS, 2022). Therefore, employees within the organizational premises may feel discriminated against and unfair by each other.
Many researchers have studied stereotype threat, however, Steele and Aronson supported this as a real phenomenon. Because they have proved that stereotypes exist everywhere in the individual mind, workplace, society, and even in the classroom. They further found that stereotypes have existed everywhere in some way or another.
For recruiting, social media is nowadays a fascination for many business houses. In this era, it is very hard to believe that they are not using social media to hire new talents in their organization. Many big companies such as Flipkart and Amazon even small business houses also use social media mediums like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. to get the best talents for different job roles. However, most companies are not looking for experienced audiences, instead, freshers or fresh graduates who are looking to get trained and start their careers (Shethna, 2022). Moreover, as everything has associated with its advantages and disadvantages social media recruiting had also various benefits and drawbacks in terms of pros, social media recruiting is convenient and easy to be used, inexpensive than other job promotion mediums, and can provide greater reach to the audiences.
On the other hand, in terms of cons, social media recruiting has been associated with loss of negativities such as negative comments on job postings which overall worsen the goodwill of the company and some told people are not aware of the social media recruiting process (McQuerrey, 2019).
References
Eva (2018). How to avoid hiring false positives — A tale of FOMO and HODL. Retrieved on 5th September 2022 from: https://ewus.medium.com/how-to-avoid-hiring-false-positives-as-much-as-possible-2ba40d554496
MacMillan, P. (2020). How to avoid false negative hiring decisions? Retrieved on 5th September 2022, from: https://jsginc.com/2020/01/how-to-avoid-false-negative-hiring-decisions/
BHS (2022). Avoiding Stereotypes in the Workplace. Retrieved on 5th September 2022, from: https://fire.baltimorecity.gov/sites/default/files/Avoiding%20Stereotypes%20in%20the%20Workplace.pdf
Heaning, E. (2022). Stereotype Threat: Definition and Examples. Retrieved on 5th September 2022, from: https://www.simplypsychology.org/stereotype-threat.html
Shethna, J. (2022). Introduction to Social Media For Recruiting. Retrieved on 5th September 2022, from: https://www.educba.com/social-media-for-recruiting/
McQuerrey, L. (2019). The Advantages & Disadvantages of Social Networking for Job Hunting. Retrieved on 5th September 2022, from: https://work.chron.com/advantages-disadvantages-social-networking-job-hunting-27557.html
