Employee referral practices (ERPs) are generally considered a best practice for organizations. Research on equality of outcomes for ERPs is mixed, however, and little is known about the influence of referring employee status characteristics during hiring processes. Using status characteristics theory and the theory of status beliefs transfer, we conducted a two-study, mixed methods investigation of how intersecting status characteristics of referring employees, namely race and gender, might lead to a transfer of evaluators’ status beliefs from a referring employee to their referred applicant. Data were collected from U.S. participants with hiring experience who completed an online résumé evaluation experiment. While quantitative analyses revealed mixed support for hypothesized effects, thematic analysis of open response data revealed intersectional evaluative differences among applicants referred by employees with different combinations of race/gender statuses. Findings suggest evaluations of applicants may have been influenced by a status beliefs transfer process whereby the intersectional status characteristics of referring employees were transferred onto and used to evaluate the applicants they referred. Further, taken together, results from the mixed-methods investigation highlight the challenges of capturing intersectional experiences via quantitative methods alone. Implications for theory, practice, and future research are discussed.
