Jobseekers resort to ‘resumé whitening’ to get a foot in the door, study shows
2016/03/18 Leave a comment
Further to earlier studies by Oreopoulos (How an ethnic-sounding name may affect the job hunt), additional confirmation of bias in resumé callbacks and the strategies being used by some visible minority applicants to improve their chances:
It’s a disturbing practice called “resumé whitening” and involves deleting telltale signs of race or ethnicity from a CV in the hopes of landing a job.
And it happens more often than you’d think.
According to a two-year study led by University of Toronto researchers, as many as 40 per cent of minority jobseekers “whiten” their resumés by adopting Anglicized names and downplaying experience with racial groups to bypass biased screeners and just get their foot in the door.
It’s when “Lamar J. Smith” becomes “L. James Smith” or “Lei Zhang” morphs to “Luke Zhang” — and the callback rates soar.
“It’s really a wake-up call for organizations to do something to address this problem. Discrimination is still a reality,” said Sonia Kang, lead author of “Whitened Resumés, Race and Self-Presentation in the Labour Market,” to be released in the Administrative Science Quarterly Journal Thursday.
“It shows us that racial minorities aren’t just passively receiving this discrimination. They are trying to do something about it.”
In the study, only 10 per cent of black job applicants — created by researchers based on real candidate profiles — received callbacks for job interviews if they stuck to their African names and experience with black organizations. However, the callback rate went up to 25.5 per cent if their names were “whitened” and their black experience was removed from their resumés.
In the case of the Asian applicants, only 11.5 per cent received callbacks if they used their Asian-sounding names and experience, compared to 21 per cent using whitened resumés.
When seeking jobs with employers known to have a pro-diversity image, minority job applicants were less likely to “whiten” their resumes, the study found.
But, perhaps most surprising, even with pro-diversity employers, the odds of getting called in for an interview were greater when a minority applicant took steps to hide their race, the research shows.
….In the third part of the research, 1,600 fictitious resumés — with no whitening, a whitened first name, whitened experience or a whitened first name and whitened experience — were sent in response to job ads.
In total, 267 or 16.7 per cent of the applications led to a job interview request. For black applicants, the callback gap between unwhitened resumés and those for which both the name and the experiences were whitened was 15.5 percentage points; for Asians, the gap was 9.5 percentage points.
Kang, an assistant professor of organizational behaviour and human resources management, said employers must go beyond the rhetoric of how they appreciate diversity in their workforce. “By creating a false sense of security, these (diversity) statements merely provide an illusion of diversity that might end up making things worse for minority applicants.”
How minority job applicants ‘whiten’ their resumés:
Unwhitened: Name of a black applicant on resumé appears as “Lamar J. Smith”;
Whitened: Changed to “L. James Smith”;
Unwhitened: Name of an Asian applicant on resumé appears as “Lei Zhang”;
Whitened: Changed it to “Luke Zhang”;
Unwhitened: Lists involvement as vice-president of Aspiring African American Business Leaders and peer counsellor of Black Students’ Association;
Whitened: Removes those organizations and replaces with causes such as “Give Kids a Smile Day” and first-year student orientation;
Unwhitened: Lists volunteer experience and interests that are exclusively within Korean community organizations;
Whitened: Removes them and replaces with hiking, snowboarding and activities common in Western culture;
Unwhitened: Being the political action chair of Black Students Association;
Whitened: Changes that to member of a generic minority business and entrepreneur group.
Source: Jobseekers resort to ‘resumé whitening’ to get a foot in the door, study shows | Toronto Star
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