In Living Color: Does In-Person Screening Affect Who Gets Hired?

We study the effects of reducing the costs of in-person interviews on hiring decisions using the introduction of a labor-market intermediary (the Accounting Rookie Camp ``ARC") that dramatically facilitated in-person screening in the academic labor market for Ph.D. accountants. In-person interviews can be more informative, but due to their high cost, they tend to be limited to a subset of pre-screened applicants. Thus, employers often rely on other signals of applicant quality and fit. Consistent with assortative matching, we find that degree program reputation and advisor connections are strong predictors of initial job market success for new PhDs. Participation in ARC significantly reduces the impacts of program rank and adviser connections. Moreover, we find that ARC participation resulted in a penalty for individuals of Asian origin, as measured by a decline in the rank of the hiring university relative to those of white individuals. This effect seems to be driven by language differences. Overall, our results indicate that while the ARC helped foster greater diversity in hiring it also led to a placement penalty to non-native English speaking individuals.