Should names be removed from CVs to avoid discrimination in job interviews?

That’s the question prompted by a British MP’s proposed change.

Trying to even the playing field for job seekers with obviously ethnic names led British Liberal Democrat MP Lynne Featherston to push this year for anonymous job applications to be included as part of the Equality Bill, still being debated in the British parliament.

She wants to see 'name blind' employment applications, where the names of applicants are hidden from those who process job applications.   Having a non-Anglo Saxon name on your application form can mean it being thrown on the reject pile because of low level discrimination, she believes.

Is there a case for New Zealand to follow suit?

Not according to the the Manager of Career Development and Employment at Victoria University, Liz Medford.   “Discrimination on the basis of ethnic stereotypes can be a problem, but the solutions are not as easy as just removing or changing names. We have certainly had job candidates who have changed their name to a more English-sounding one to try to give themselves a better chance. But changing your name creates all sorts of other problems - how would an employer know if someone has applied for the job before? And then their name doesn’t match their passport and academic record, so employers can’t verify those.”   Liz Medford also worries that anonymous CVs would be easier to falsify, and that may end up working against the applicant.

It seems from the research, then, that the suspicions of non-New Zealand born job-seekers that their ethnicity is a major reason they are being rejected may be well- founded. Getting a foot in the door is hard if you can’t even get as far as the interview.

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What the research shows
Professor Marie Wilson and researchers from Auckland University’s Business School investigated the effect of ethnicity on the short listing of job applicants. They wanted to test whether having an obviously ethnic name affected a person’s chances of being shortlisted. Their research showed that when job seekers with equal qualifications apply for positions where the only obvious difference is their ethnicity - and often their name is the major clue to this - ethnic applicants are more often told that they are ‘not suitable’ or fail to get called to an interview. European New Zealanders have few such problems.

This phenomenon has been well documented in other research, the researchers said, and is termed the ‘ethnic penalty’.

“Across ethnic groupings, additional penalties appear to apply to those who are immigrants, with foreign qualifications and experience, and/or foreign- sounding names’, the researchers found.

At Victoria University’s Centre for Applied Cross Cultural Research, Professor Colleen Ward and Dr Anne-Marie Masgoret also investigated the responses of recruitment agencies to immigrant and native-born candidates. They sent two resumes, prepared by an international consultant, to 85 recruitment agencies throughout New Zealand, equivalent in everything except that one bore the name of a European (Pakeha) New Zealander and the other a Chinese immigrant.

While the New Zealand candidate was actively recruited by almost a third of the agencies, under 10% were interested in meeting the fictional Chinese candidate. Most of the agencies said there were no job opportunities for him, and only 3% added him to the agency database.

A recruitment company's view
Recruitment company the Johnson Group has just been highly commended by the EEO Trust’s Work Life Awards for its work with skilled migrants. It is part of a programme which puts migrants into 6 week internships. Now into its 5th year, the programme has had over 80% of its interns go on to paid jobs.   “The key is cracking the local market and getting that first job”, says General Manager Campbell Hepburn. “We see many people with foreign names who have applied for dozens of jobs and never got a job interview. No one says overtly ‘we don’t want a foreigner’, but there’s no doubt that discrimination exists.”

He has seen several Asian migrants change their name to an anglicised one.   “I doubt that it works, but it is a reflection of how they see the market treating them.”

Unspoken discrimination against people from different ethnic backgrounds is a challenge all of us must face, Campbell Hepburn believes.

“New Zealand has to get its head around it. We need immigrants to supply our future workforce - we can’t grow enough on our own. Our future wealth depends on giving these people a decent chance to make a contribution.”