Foreigners face discrimination in online recruitment, study confirms

With the help of machine learning, Swiss researchers have found that foreign jobseekers are on average 6.5% less likely to be contacted by recruiters than Swiss people with identical requirements. Most studies on discrimination in recruitment have used methods such as sending fictitious CVs to recruiters. These are typically costly and analyse only specific job applicants. However, a study published this week in science journal Nature, led by researchers from federal technology institute ETH Zurich and the KOF Economic Research Center, tracked the search behaviour of recruiters on employment websites and used machine learning to control for all relevant jobseeker characteristics that are visible to recruiters. The researchers worked with the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) to gain access to anonymised data from Job-​Room over a ten-month period. Job-Room is one of the largest recruitment platforms in Switzerland, containing profiles including gender, nationality...