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Comment by jgs1 | Hacker News Reader

Isn't it likely that Monster has some sort of "freshness" indicator that might rank new profiles higher than old ones that haven't been updated in a while?

A better experiment would have been to create two similar profiles at the same time with the only difference being the name and diversity questionnaire.

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At some point her real resume was fresh, and it doesn't sound like she experienced the same level of response then that she received on her fake fresh resume. Of course maybe the insurance industry wasn't hiring as eagerly when her real resume was fresh. Oh well, let's just assume it's experiment error and her conclusions are baseless. There, I feel better.

I actually added this link to run an experiment. I have been playing around a lot with the nltk package and after I saw the one link similar to this on the front page, I remembered that this story got flagged for not being techie enough. So now that we are getting a discussion going I can run sentiment analyses on the comments to text for variances on different levels.

You've now contaminated your experimental results.

I look forward to seeing the results. This story is already off the front page despite clearly deserving to be there from vote counts. Feel free to email me if I can help.

I understand discrimination is real and I wasn't implying otherwise. But I also worked in the past for a monster competitor and I can say that at least at the company I worked for "new" candidates were promoted much more than existing candidates.

Hiring managers would much rather see an email titled "20 new candidates for your XYZ position!" than "20 people who haven't updated their profile in 2 years for your XYZ position".

Creating two profiles at the same time would eliminate this issue, although employers might then wonder why 2 candidates have the exact same profiles...

Well, dismissing her experience based on a "freshness rating" hypothesis wouldn't be justified, but she does say that she had "used [Monster] in the past and...been successful in obtaining jobs through it."

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