Stigma in the Hiring Process: How Small Business Employers Evaluate “Marked” Individuals as Potential Workers

Purpose: Labor force participation rates are low among people with severe mental illness. Previous research, based on vignette and survey studies, demonstrates that employers are more reluctant to hire these individuals, which suggests that stigma contributes to their low employment rates. To generate effective solutions to the problems of stigma and discrimination, research must likewise examine the contexts in which they occur: for example, the connection between employers' lay beliefs about mental illness and their anticipation of specific outcomes in the workplace. In this qualitative study we examine employers' assumptions about the capacities of potential workers with mental illness and show how these attributions translate into negative expectations for workplace performance. Also, this study contrasts employers' reports about hiring workers with mental illness to their reports about hiring people with a second highly stigmatized condition, substance abuse, to capture the unique nature of mental illness stigma.

Methods: Semi-structured face-to-face interviews were conducted with 40 small business employers in a major Midwestern city. Employers were selected from a random list of small businesses stratified by SIC classes on the criterion that they had managerial discretion over hiring and no HR department. Interviews inquired about firm origins and development; description of the hiring process, with focus on entry-level hiring; and experiences the employers had with workers with mental illness with various behavioral health conditions. Employers were asked how they believed these disorders would manifest in the workplace and what concerns (or expectations) they had about hiring such individuals. Data were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim, and coded using Nvivo.

Results: Even when employers expressed sympathy and tolerance toward people with mental illness and substance abuse as fellow human beings, they were nonetheless reluctant to knowingly hire them. They characterized people with mental illness as exhibiting unusual thinking (bizarreness, communication difficulty, irrationality, and inappropriateness) and erraticism (unpredictability and moodiness), whereas they predicted that people who abuse substances would be unreliable and exhibit poor judgment in the workplace. For both mental illness and substance abuse, employers expressed worry that the workers would compromise safety in the workplace and that their interpersonal deficits would harm the business; however, these concerns were manifest differently across conditions. These attributed characteristics clashed with employers' vision of an idealized worker (flexible, motivated, dependable) and were seen as incompatible with the physically intimate and generalist nature of small business environments, where employers feel insufficiently buffered against the threat of a “problem worker.”

Conclusions: This research confirmed the notion that employers harbor stigma against people with mental health disorders, and offers new information about why employers may discriminate against such individuals. Common stereotypes about mental illness and substance abuse (unusual thinking, unpredictability, untrustworthiness) are in fact the very negative image of the ideal worker. These results complicate the dilemma of whether to advise people with mental illness to disclose their conditions to employers and suggest that anti-stigma campaigns must go beyond training the public to become more empathic toward people with mental illness by targeting specific contextual concerns of employers.