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Friday February 11th, 10:00 - 11:15am, BeijingTime
Abstract: Organizations tout the importance of innovation and entrepreneurship. Yet, it remains unclear how they evaluate entrepreneurial human capital—namely, job candidates with founder experience. Understanding how hiring firms evaluate this experience is important because it reveals insights into structures and processes within organizations. Organizations research points to two organizational perspectives related to the evaluation of founder experience: Former founders may be advantaged, due to founder experience signaling high-quality capabilities and human capital, or disadvantaged, due to concerns related to fit and commitment. To identify the dominant class of mechanisms driving the evaluation of founder experience, we posit that it is important to consider how these evaluations differ depending on whether the founder’s venture failed or succeeded. To understand the demand-side mechanisms and hold supply side factors constant, we conducted a field experiment. We sent applications varying the candidate’s founder experience to 2,400 software engineering positions in the U.S. at random.We find evidence of a founder disadvantage such that former founders received 43 percent fewer callbacks than non-founders. Furthermore, we find this disadvantage to be greater for former successful founders, who received 33 percent fewer callbacks than former failed founders, and that older firms drive this difference. Our results highlight that mechanisms related to concerns about fit and commitment, rather than information asymmetry about quality, are most influential for how hiring firms evaluate former founders in our context.
Speaker: Prof. Tristan L. Botelho from Yale School of Management.
https://som.yale.edu/faculty/tristan-l-botelho
Dr. Botelho earned his Ph.D. from MIT Sloan. His research is in the areas of entrepreneurship, labor markets, organizational sociology, and strategy. One stream of his research focuses on the factors that contribute to bias and inequality in evaluation processes. His work has been featured at Management Science, Organization Science, and Administrative Science Quarterly. He was recognized by Poets & Quants as Best 40 Under 40 Professors in 2020.