Job Opportunities Fewer for People with Non-English Names

University of British Colombia experts have recently published a new study showing the fact that people with Pakistani, Indian or Chinese names have a much lower chance of having their applications accepted for various positions than applicants who have English-sounding names. During the research, thousands of CVs were sent to a large number of Canadian companies, and the number of callbacks for each name group was then analyzed, as opposed to the other groups. The research revealed a 40 percent higher chance of English-sounding names being accepted for interviews, than foreign ones.

According to the paper, names like Jill Wilson or John Martin were more likely to receive a phone call asking the owners to an interview than names like Sana Khan or Lei Li. One of the greatest achievements of the current study is that it manages to provide a partial explanation of why skilled labor force coming in Canada from abroad fares so poorly on the national labor market. Under the point system, experts in various fields, with university degrees and extensive experience, are supposed to find jobs under the country's top employees.

“The findings suggest that a distinct foreign-sounding name may be a significant disadvantage on the job market – even if you are a second- or third-generation citizen,” Professor Philip Oreopoulos, who is an economist at the UBC, explained. He was also the author of a new paper detailing the find, published yesterday by the Metropolis BC, an international immigration and diversity research network. More than 6,000 resumes have been designed for the new study, representing a wide variety of personality, nationality and ethnicity types that exist in the country today.

Approximately 2,000 job requirements were addressed with the CVs, after the documents were specifically tailored to fit the job descriptions. A large part of the people in the fake resumes were given English-sounding names, while the majority received immigrant names. The experts sent the papers to companies employing in some 20 occupational categories, all located in the Greater Toronto Area, which is the most culturally diverse region of Canada. The results revealed the fact that employers in the rest of the country might be be even more reluctant to hiring foreigners, no matter their qualifications.

“If employers are engaging in name-based discrimination, they may be contravening the Human Rights Act. They may also be missing out on hiring the best person for the job,” Oreopoulos added. He said that the seriousness of the situation might require studies on an international level, to test if such discrimination occured at a much wider scale around the globe. The paper also revealed the fact that job experience accumulated in Canada was also a determining factor in the number of callbacks to foreign names.