Study finds candidates with Asian-sounding names are less likely to get job interview in Canada

A new academic research in Canada released recently has shown that people with Chinese, Indian and Pakistani-sounding names are 28 percent less likely to get invited to a job interview than ‘fictitious candidates’ with English-sounding names.

Researchers at Toronto’s Ryerson University sent out 13,000 fake resumes to over 3,000 job postings and found that “if resumes had an Asian-sounding name paired with some or all foreign qualifications, employers were between 35 percent (in the case of large firms) and 60 percent (in the case of small firms) less likely to call the candidate for an interview.”

The study drew data from job listings in Canada from 2011 until early 2017.

According to government statistics, the highest number of immigrants to Canada comes from the Philippines, followed by Indian and China.

In 2015, around 50,846 immigrants from the Philippines admitted to Canada which is 18.7 percent of the total intake for the year. From India, the number of permanents was 39,530 (14.5 percent) and from China the number was 19,532 (7.2 percent).

Statistics Canada says some 61 percent of the new immigrants in 2015 came from the top 10 source counties.

Though, until recent years, on an average 4,000 Bangladeshis used to immigrate to Canada every year, but the number of applicants dropped after Express Entry procedure put in place from early 2015.

Many Bangladeshi immigrants have complained that after spending hours trawling through job listings they find it difficult to get a job interview though “they have got qualifications, soft skills and even Canadian experience.”

Though the Ryerson study drew on data from job listings in Canada, but this problem is by no means limited to one country.

For example, a smaller study commissioned by the French government last year found that “employers were less likely to interview candidates with North-African-sounding names.”

Over to the United Kingdom, an all-parliamentary group study from 2012 found that “women who ‘whitened’ their names or made them sound more British had to send only half as many applications before being invited to interview as those who sounded foreign.”

The issue is reported in the Global Agenda section of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in 2017.

The research report considered it a ‘widespread problem’ and suggested educating the recruiters, so that “they become aware of the decisions they’re making and why.”

“We’re not claiming that employers engage in discriminatory behaviour consciously or that this is necessarily an issue of racism,” explains Marianne Bertrand, a researcher who worked on yet another study revealing bias in hiring.

“It is important to teach people in charge of hiring about the subconscious biases they may have, and figure out a way to change these patterns.”

“Many companies have started providing training on unconscious bias. But some experts are sceptical, pointing to studies that show this training does not work.”

In the UK, some big companies – HSBC, KPMG and Deloitte, for example – have already implemented what is being called “name-blind recruitment” in an attempt to stamp out discrimination, according to the WEF.

But, the problem with this approach is that it perhaps only delays the inevitable as “once the candidate makes it to a face-to-face interview, unconscious (and sometimes conscious) bias rears its ugly head again.”