Detecting discrimination in the hiring process: evidence from an Internet-based search channel

This article uses data from an Internet-based CV database to study how job searchers’ ethnicity, employment status, age, and gender affect how often they are contacted by firms. Since we know which types of information that are available to the recruiting firms, we can handle some of the problems with unobserved heterogeneity better than many existing discrimination studies. We find that searchers who have non-Nordic names, are unemployed or old get significantly fewer firm contacts. Moreover, this matters for the hiring outcome: searchers who get more contacts have a higher probability of getting hired. Copyright Springer-Verlag 2012