Elite professional service firms are increasingly adopting technological solutions in their hiring practices to open opportunities and diversify talent.

One such practice is using hiring games—virtual tools designed to look and feel like traditional video games but with ostensibly psychometric underpinnings—to select new hires. Drawing from a qualitative study of game creators as well as hiring managers and job candidates at elite firms, Profesor Rivera's research shows that while the goal of these games is to increase equity in hiring, they magnify existing inequalities by social class, nationality, and disability status.

Meet the speaker and chair:

Professor Lauren Rivera is the Peter G. Peterson Chair in Corporate Ethics and Professor of Management & Organizations at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Her research focuses on how the way people evaluate and define merit in elite settings shapes social inequalities by social class, gender, race, and disability status. She also studies interventions that can increase equity in workplaces and schools. She is the author of the best-selling book Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs (Princeton University Press, 2015) and has written for the New York Times, Fortune, Harvard Business Review, and Chicago Tribune. Her work has received various prizes from the American Sociological Association and the Academy of Management. Lauren received her Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University and graduated magna cum laude from Yale University with a B.A. in Sociology and Psychology. Prior to becoming a professor, she was a consultant at Monitor Group London.

Professor Sam Friedman (@SamFriedmanSoc) is a sociologist of class and inequality and Professor of Sociology at LSE. His research focuses in particular on the cultural dimensions of contemporary class division. His upcoming book with Professor Aaron Reeves explores how the British elite has changed over the last 120 years. His previous book, The Class Ceiling: Why it Pays to be Privileged, researched social mobility into Britain’s higher professional and managerial occupations.