In Simple Words
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.
Applications to Canadian job postings
- English name, Canadian credentials
- 15.7% received a callback
- Chinese, Indian or Pakistani name
- 11.3% received a callback
Randomized resume names with Canadian education and experience. Chinese, Indian and Pakistani names pooled; interview callbacks, not final hiring.
See source →Research question
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.
Participants
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.
Study Design
Resume correspondence field experiment randomly assigning English, Indian, Pakistani, Chinese, and Greek names to resumes with standardized Canadian education and work experience.
Results
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.
Takeaway
Organizations should implement anonymized or name-masked application processes where candidate contact details are removed during initial resume screening to ensure impartial interview selection.
Source and citation
See source →Read alongside the research
Plain-English glossary
Original explanations, informed by the references below. Examples are illustrations, not data from the studies above. The research text stays unchanged.
- Percentage points
The difference between two percentages.
ExampleA rise from 40% to 50% is 10 percentage points. Relative to the starting value, that is a 25% increase.
Office for National Statistics · Percentages ↗Read more about percentage points →- Statistically significant
A label used when a result passes a chosen statistical threshold, often p < 0.05. It does not show how large or useful an effect is. A result that is not statistically significant does not prove there is no effect.
ExampleA study reports p = 0.03 against a 0.05 threshold. It passes that test, but the effect could still be too small to matter.
American Statistical Association · Statement on p-values ↗Read more about statistically significant →