People with English names more likely to get jobs: Study

Columbia, May 23: People seeking jobs are more likely to succeed if they have English names, according to a Canadian study, which suggests that immigrants from India, Pakistan or China face discrimination by employers.

The new University of British Columbia study, which sent thousands of resumes to Canadian employers, found those with English names like Jill Wilson or John Martin received interview callbacks 40 per cent more often than identical resumes with names like Rajan Pillai, Sana Khan or Lei Li.

“The findings suggest that a distinct foreign-sounding name may be a significant disadvantage on the job market even if you are a second- or third-generation citizen,” said UBC Economics Prof. Philip Oreopoulos, who is affiliated with National Bureau of Economic Research and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.

Prof. Oreopoulos’s paper was released by Metropolis BC, part of an international immigration and diversity research network.

It suggests that Canadians and immigrants with non-English names face discrimination by employers and help to explain why skilled immigrants arriving under Canadas point system with university degrees and significant work experience fare poorly in the job market, Eurekalert online reported.

For the study, 6,000 mock resumes were constructed to represent recent immigrants and Canadians with and without non-English names. They were tailored to job requirements and dispatched to 2,000 online job postings from employers across 20 occupational categories in the Greater Toronto Area, Canada’s largest and most multicultural city, it said.