In Simple Words
Imagine a restaurant manager throwing away letters from foreign food suppliers because of minor grammar errors on the envelope, instead of spending two minutes on a brief phone call to check whether the supplier can supply the needed ingredients. Employers toss out foreign resumes based on paper assumptions rather than taking two minutes to call and confirm actual spoken communication skills.
Research question
Employers frequently pass over qualified candidates with non-traditional or foreign backgrounds due to unverified assumptions about spoken language skills and accent, despite the extremely low financial and time cost of a preliminary phone conversation.
Participants
Qualitative field inquiry with 29 human resource recruiters combined with quantitative analysis across 12,910 resume submissions in Toronto and Montreal.
Study Design
Evaluation of qualitative recruiter rationalizations regarding language concerns compared against economic decision models to propose low-cost procedural screening interventions.
Results
Recruiters cite spoken language uncertainty as the primary reason for foreign resume rejections, yet systematically decline to perform 2-minute screening phone calls to verify language ability, resulting in severe misallocation of skilled labor.
Takeaway
Hiring departments should adopt a mandatory 3-to-5 minute phone screening step for all candidates who meet baseline technical criteria prior to rejecting resumes based on language skill concerns.