July 19, 2011, 6:20 pm Jackie Quist Today Tonight
Discrimination comes in many forms, but how many people miss out on a job simply because of their name?
Having the right qualifications, experience and references should be all that matters when you go for a job interview. Sometimes though, an applicant by any other name, is not as sweet.
According to Australian-born Miroslaw Mirski, when it comes to securing a job, the name of the game is to sound like an Englishman.
After changing his first name to John, he found that his surname was still being scrutinised. "People are still questioning my racial origin," Miroslaw said, and he feels that this is leading to discrimination.
Unemployed for 22 monthsm the qualified engineer with Polish heritage is convinced Aussie employers prefer Anglo-Saxon sounding candidates, and Professor Andrew Leigh agrees.
"The most call-backs come for Anglo-Australians. The fewest come from Chinese job seekers," Professor Leigh said.
Professor Leigh and researchers from the Australian National University put employers to the test, sending out 4,000 identical resumes to measure reactions to different ethnic names.
They discovered that names were more important than the details and experience listed by the so-called candidates, finding Anglo-Saxons were called back 35 per cent of the time, followed by Italians, the Indigenous, then the Middle Eastern, and finally Chinese job hunters.
"They're all fake IDs, so we can be sure when we see differences in call-back rates between Ahmed Harrari and John Smith, that's actually racism rather than anything else," explained Professor Leigh.
