Minority job applicants who resort to “resume whitening” – a practice in which candidates alter any information on their resume that indicates their ethnicity – are more than twice as likely to receive a callback than those who don’t, a new study has found.
“It’s really a wake-up call for organizations to do something to address this problem. Discrimination is still a reality,” said Sonia Kang, co-author of the study and assistant professor at the University of Toronto Mississauga.
During the two-year study, which was published in the Administrative Science Quarterly Journal, Kang and her colleagues sent out 1,600 fabricated resumes, based off of real candidates, to employers in 16 different metropolitan areas in the US. Some resumes were left as is, whereas others were “whitened”.
While 25.5% of resumes received callbacks if African American candidates’ names were “whitened”, only 10% received a callback if they left their name and experience unaltered. For Asian applicants, 21% heard back if they changed their resume, and only 11.5% of candidates did if their resumes were not “whitened”.
When companies present a pro-diversity image, applicants are less likely to “whiten” their resume, according to the study. Yet Kang said the gap between callbacks for “whitened” resumes and unaltered ones “was no smaller for pro-diversity employers than employers who didn’t mention diversity at all”.
The researchers also interviewed 59 Asian and African American candidates between the ages of 18 and 25. Thirty-six percent said they “whiten” their resumes, and two-thirds reported knowing someone who does.
“Most studies that have examined racial discrimination in hiring have focused on the employer side,” Kang said. “We focused on the job-seeker side too, and found that minorities aren’t just passive recipients of discrimination, they’re actively trying to do something about this.”
The two groups profiled tended to use different techniques in order to disguise their ethnicities. Asian applicants were more likely to change their names or use a middle name instead of their first name; African American interviewees tended to exclude race-focused organizations and awards.
“We interviewed one student who had an extremely prestigious merit-based scholarship which was open only to applicants of a particular racial group,” Kang said. “He chose to leave that excellent achievement off of his resume because he knew it would give away his race.”
She added: “Some people have found that whitening helps but I think that the larger message is that it shouldn’t be up to minorities to find ways to avoid discrimination.”