Ethnic Name Hiring Discrimination
Job applicants with ethnic-sounding names suffer lower interview callback rates compared to applicants with majority-group or English-sounding names, even when listed education and work experience are completely identical and obtained domestically. This barrier prevents qualified minority candidates from reaching the interview stage of the hiring process.
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.
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. Resumes with Greek names experienced a statistically significant 4.0 percentage point reduction in callback rates compared to English names.
- Who
- 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.
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)."
Why Do Skilled Immigrants Struggle in the Labor Market? A Field Experiment with Thirteen Thousand Resumes