Drawing on attributional augmenting to unlock the potential of cybervetting to combat gender discrimination in hiring

Abstract

Wilcox et al. (2022) astutely addressed the influence of current cybervetting practices with respect to three main stakeholders: job candidates, hiring managers, and organizations. In light of increased awareness of gender-related biases encumbering equitable organizational decision making (e.g., Gaddis, 2015), a particularly important and timely consideration raised by Wilcox et al. was the potential for cybervetting to have a discriminatory effect on job candidates. Yet, despite this (very legitimate) concern that cybervetting may risk exacerbating such inequities, we further consider the contrary possibility that in certain contexts it may harbor some potential to mitigate them. To this end, we consider attributional augmenting as a psychological process via which cybervetting has the potential to attenuate inequitable and discriminatory hiring decisions.