Ethnic Name Hiring Discrimination

Picture this

Think of a hiring manager sorting through a stack of hundreds of job applications on a tight deadline, like a person quickly flipping through channels on a TV. When seeing a channel name that looks unfamiliar or hard to pronounce, the person presses next without stopping to watch the show. A non-English name acts like an unfamiliar channel trigger, causing the recruiter to skip the resume before reading the actual qualifications listed on the page [18, 19].

What the evidence says

Changing an applicant name from an English-sounding name to an Indian, Pakistani, or Chinese name reduced interview callbacks by 4.4 percentage points (from 15.7% down to 11.3%), meaning English-named applicants were 39% more likely to receive a callback [13, 14, 17]. Resumes with Greek names experienced a statistically significant 4.0 percentage point reduction in callback rates compared to English names [13, 17, 20].

Who was studied

N = 12,910 resumes submitted to 3,225 job postings for occupations requiring 3 to 7 years of experience and a bachelor's degree in Toronto and Montreal [7, 8, 10].

How

Resume correspondence field experiment randomly assigning English, Indian, Pakistani, Chinese, and Greek names to resumes with standardized Canadian education and work experience [8, 10, 11].

What to do

Organizations should implement anonymized or name-masked application processes where candidate contact details are removed during initial resume screening to ensure impartial interview selection [21].

From the source

"Employer contact falls by 4.4 percentage points when switching from a Canadian resume with a common English name to one with a common Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, or even Greek name (15.7 percent to 11.3 percent, respectively)." [17]

Why Do Skilled Immigrants Struggle in the Labor Market? A Field Experiment with Thirteen Thousand Resumes

Tags

• discrimination
• hiring bias
• resume audit
• ethnic penalty