Animating Inequality: Hiring Games and Social Reproduction in Elite Firms

Automation is reshaping contemporary workplaces, including how organizations evaluate and hire workers. While scholars have documented algorithmic biases in hiring technologies, less is known about how these tools are implemented and experienced in practice and what their consequences are for social inequality. In this article, we the use of examine hiring games, a form of automated assessment that evaluates candidates through simulated interactions in visually rich, video-game-like interfaces, in some of the highest paying employers in the United States: elite professional service firms. Drawing from qualitative data collected from hiring game vendors, firm executives, and job candidates, we seek to understand the role that hiring games are playing in elite recruitment. We find that, although developers and employers view hiring games as tools for expanding and equalizing opportunity, they also preserve key advantages for historically dominant groups. We identify four features of hiring games that contribute to this process—abstraction, essentialism, explicit reproduction, and curated opacity. We find that hiring games technically do expand the set of individuals who are eligible to apply for jobs in elite firms. However, we argue they also serve as new form of social reproduction in elite labor markets.