Discrimination upon Recruitment. The Influence of Ethnic Characteristics on Recruiters’ Decisions in Personnel Selection – A Study on the Applicability of Research Material.

The present study consists of paper-and-pencil surveys (i.e., questionnaires), handed out to students at the Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR) in the Netherlands and to working people from Belgium and the Netherlands, with the purpose of testing and developing research materials for a series of studies on discrimination in recruitment (Derous, Nguyen & Ryan, May 2006). Four aspects that are potentially related to discrimination in recruitment practices, are pilot tested, namely equivalence of resumes, ethnicity of first and last names, ethnicity of affiliations, and whether jobs are considered either front office jobs or back office jobs. The results of the studies show that the presented resumes are generally perceived as equivalent by both groups of respondents, regarding most aspects (i.e., type of education, level of education and amount of work experience), except for “kind of work experience” and “hobbies”. Generally, affiliations and last/first names are appropriate for further research. However, some affiliations and last/first names are not, since the respondents’ attributions are not in line with the ethnicity assumed by the researchers. Finally, the results show that the presented jobs are difficult to divide into the front office and back office categories. Indeed, it turns out that most jobs are not suitable for such labelling, except for “public relations specialist”, “technical writer”, “occupational therapist” and “clinical laboratory technologist”. This is mainly due to the contribution from the group of working people.