Ethnic discrimination during résumé screening: Interactive effects of applicants’ ethnic salience with job context
通过实验研究424名白人HR专业人员，发现深色皮肤求职者在高客户接触/低行业地位和低客户接触/高行业地位职位中受到更低评价，表明工作情境影响种族线索的显著性并微妙地引导招聘歧视。
Systematic research considering job context as affecting ethnic discrimination in hiring is limited. Building on contemporary literature on social categorization and cognitive matching, the interactive effect of context characteristics (client contact; industry status) and person characteristics (i.e. ethnic cues: Maghreb/Arab vs Flemish-sounding name; dark vs light skin tone) were investigated using an experimental field study among 424 white majority HR professionals. Findings showed that equally qualified applicants with a dark skin tone received lower job suitability ratings than applicants with a light skin tone, particularly when they were screened for high client contact/low industry status positions and low client contact/high industry status positions. It is concluded that some ethnic cues (such as skin tone) may be more salient compared with other cues and that job context may influence the salience of ethnic cues and steer hiring discrimination in subtle ways. Implications of these findings for hiring discrimination research and organizations are discussed.