When it comes to job applications, Siham Hagi Hussein says she feels lucky she was born in Canada and speaks without a distinct accent, but she thinks her name may have had an effect sometimes.
“Just because my name is uncommon, it can deter hiring managers from hiring me,” the graduate student at the University of Regina said.
As a former service industry worker, Hussein said that when she would be looking for employment, she used to hand in her resume in person so that the hiring staff could get to know her “a little bit more and not just base likeability or hire-ability off of the name.”
Hussein’s instincts were probably right. A forthcoming study has found that hiring bias exists for many managers, with a candidate’s race, country of origin, immigration status, Indigeneity, gender and physical appearance being among the deciding factors.
The forthcoming research in the Economic and Labour Relations Review found that many hiring managers have set ideas about an ideal employee.
CBC News previewed the research, which was based on 92 interviews carried out between 2021 and 2022 among business owners, employment agency representatives, union representatives, hiring managers and individuals who had been employed as food service workers in Saskatchewan and Ontario.
The study provides a useful snapshot into what could be Canada-wide trends.
Hussein contributed as a research assistant, connecting some of her old colleagues with the study.
“After listening to my colleagues or other workers within the city, it was really obvious that these experiences of mine weren’t unique and they are almost universal to all people of colour working in food service,” she said. “It was almost therapeutic.”
Workplace patterns visible, employee says
Ishema Mwunvaneza understands the situation all too well.
He has worked as a bartender and server for eight years at five different bars in Regina. He said he has never had an interview, always getting hired “just through word of mouth.”
“The numbers still don’t lie … white people front of the house, brown people in the kitchen and then black people were the bouncers on the weekend,” he said.
Mwunvaneza said even in the most progressive workplaces, he has seen similar workplace patterns. On many occasions, he said he has been the only racialized person among the front-facing staff.
“In my eight years bartending, I’ve only worked with one other person of African descent in front of the house,” he said.
He said hiring managers get “slightly triggered” when he points out these inequities — and at chain restaurants and bars, it can be even worse, with racism blatantly prevalent.
‘Stereotypes and biases’
Andrew Stevens, an associate professor in the faculty of business administration at University of Regina, co-authored the forthcoming study with Catherine E. Connelly, a business research professor of organizational behaviour at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont.
He said he saw firsthand, among his students, the effects of hiring bias. Many students who had names “that weren’t white-sounding” were “routinely denied access to entry level positions,” he said.
The Morning Edition – Sask11:38U of R professor studies hiring biases in the restaurant industry
If you’re going through resumes and see a name you can’t pronounce, do you move it to the bottom? Do you make some assumptions about whether that person is the worker you’re looking for? Researchers sent out 6000 fake resumes of different ethnicities and backgrounds with the same experience in Saskatchewan and Ontario. We’ll talk to Andrew Stevens about what they learned.
Another question Stevens said he wanted to study was the legitimacy of labour shortage concerns. Restaurants Canada, for example, has found that the food service and accommodation sector has one of the highest vacancy rates of any Canadian industry with nearly 100,000 empty jobs, accounting for one of every six vacancies.
“We notice a big difference between the number of callbacks an Indigenous applicant would get with the same quality credentials as a white person from Saskatchewan has … a lot of it is stereotypes and biases that would compromise one person’s ability because of their ethnicity,” Stevens told host Stefani Langenegger on CBC Radio’s The Morning Edition.
Stevens said when it comes to being hired, women come out on top in terms of their chances of getting a job, but the advantage might stop there.
“They are overrepresented in the industry. They’re also underpaid by comparison. The irony is women are more likely to get a foot in the door, but also less likely to be paid the same,” Stevens said.
Stevens said in their research, they came across instances where perfectly qualified women would not be hired unless their physical attributes were “deemed to be aesthetically pleasing by that hiring manager.”
He said these “gendered and sexualized” notions of being the right fit for a job need to be unlearned through education and awareness. Beyond the popular notions of EDI — equity, diversity and inclusion — as human resources practices, he said employers should acknowledge anti-racism.
“It’s not just about diversity. It’s about outward forms of discrimination, racism, but it’s also about certain assumptions and stereotypes we build in our heads and collectively in society about who is capable and who we deem to be hard-working and who is just thought to be perhaps underperforming,” he said.
“We found in the study that anti-Indigenous racism specifically was far more entrenched in Saskatchewan than it was in Ontario.”
He said temporary foreign worker applications are not being taken seriously from the policy side, in terms of interrogating employers who say they don’t have any qualified candidates, and employers should be held accountable if they claim they are not finding anyone qualified.
“There’s a lot of folks here going overlooked simply because of assumptions that we hold about particular candidates.”