Would a foreign name put you off?
October 21, 2009
Fascinating Government research has found that many employers are put off applicants with names that don’t sound British, and that people with foreign-sounding names are less likely to secure a job than someone with a traditional British name.
The Department for Work and Pensions carried out research by sending 3,000 fake job applications to employers, with three different names: Nazia Mahmood, Mariam Namagembe and Alison Taylor. All the false applicants had similar backgrounds and qualifications, and were all educated in the UK. The Asian and African named applicants had to apply for 16 jobs on average before getting an interview, but Alison Taylor was given an interview after nine applications.
The worrying results indicate that racial discrimination in employment is still common in UK organisations, more than thirty years after the Race Relations Act was created to try to stop it. It begs the question is the Equality Bill, that the Government is promoting as the magical answer to all of our equality problems, actually going to do more to solve these issues? Jim Knight, minister for employment and welfare reform thinks so:
“We are determined to stop this scourge on society - the equality bill will strengthen our hand and we are already preparing to publish specific plans for dealing with discrimination in the workplace later this year.”
The results suggested that using standard application forms rather than other forms of application, may be more likely to avoid discrimination, as applicants for public sector vacancies were not subject to the same ‘foreign name’ discrimination. Most public sector application forms actually detach the personal details and equality monitoring pages before the application is sent for short listing. However this process is not always possible in the private sector – public sector vacancies are renowned for taking many weeks and even months to be processed, but in my organisation the effect of this kind of time period would be disastrous. In fast paced commercial environments, candidates for roles need to be found efficiently, and in many industries, the need to fill out complicated forms would put a lot of applicants off. In these organisations it is interventions such as equality and diversity training for those involved in selection processes that will have a better impact on reducing discrimination whilst maintaining high volume, high pace recruitment practices.
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