Can I claim racial discrimination if I'm not in a racial minority?

Ash_Pole

Hi forum.

I'm a frustrated jobseeker and have been for a couple of years now. I bang off CV's - tailored to the position I'm applying for - but I rarely get a response, never mind an interview.

I'm looking for a position in finance. I used the reed website as this seems to be where just about everything is advertised. But here's the thing. I spoke to a friend recently who's at the other side - he recruits on reed for finance jobs. I asked his opinion on what I'm doing wrong and after a few drinks he opened up a bit.

He says for any finance job he will normally get in excess of 100 applications. Even if he specifies quite exact skill/experience requirements he gets dozens of people who will simply apply for anything with "finance" in the title who aren't remotely qualified for the job. And he says maybe 75% of applications are awful with terrible spelling, poor CV layouts, and obvious standard covering letters. He went on to say that there is a very strong correlation between these awful candidates and "foreign sounding" names. He says he usually doesn't have the time to read every single application so often as a short cut he'll reject any person's name that he doesn't like the sound of.

My surname is "foreign sounding", but is actually just a very old name and my ethnic group is white British.

So I tried to test this. I created a dummy CV with a very British name, with similar experience and qualifications to my real one.

I applied for five jobs on reed with both CV's.

The first I got a rejection email for both.

The next three I received no response at all.

The fifth though I received a positive response from. I've met with the agent (nearly all finance jobs are via agencies), and he said I was a strong candidate and he would put my details forward. But, this is with my fake CV. My real CV with my real name, I received nothing from.

So, I'm suspecting my lack of previous success has been due to my surname. Obviously this is only one data point but I find it a remarkable result. Not that I am seriously considering it at this point, but I'm wondering if it is possible for someone to sue for racial discrimination if they are not from a racial minority?

SarEl

Your freind is a pillock. If he recruits in this way without any regard for the skills and abilities of candidates, then he is also a racist pillock.

Your little exercise is fascinating as a research degree, but useless in law. In the first instance - your belief isn't relevant, only what you can prove, and so far all you have proven is that your friend is a racist. In the second instance - you have one example to base your delusions on. The other four were equal opportunities employers - none of them wanted you at all.

I find nothing remarkable except for the fact that you have the time to waste on such things - perhaps you should spend your time more closely examining why 9 out of ten of the applications weren't wanted???

LL30

Lol, you've been busy! Just so you know, yes, you can file for race discrimination whatever race you are - IF you have a case that is. I did it, but it's not pretty. I have one employment tribunal under my belt, and signed a compromise agreement for another (same employer) - would have gone the whole way, but my daughter was born prematurely, so priorities changed I'd advise that you throw your energies into something else, employment law is a crock of !!!! IMHO (Oh, and your mate sounds like he needs a new job!)

KiKi

As SarEl said, your friend is an idiot.

A recent study did a similar thing, sending in hundreds of equal applications with different names. It found two things. Firstly, the 'foreign' sounding names were *much* more likely to be rejected. Sad but true. Secondly, interviewers made distinctions between 'white' sounding names. Ie, John is excellent, Clare is pretty good, and Jamie we would look at. But they made almost no / zero distinction between 'foreign' sounding names who were all considered poor. Not even 'really bad' and 'inadequate', but all lumped together.

Despite everything there is still undercurrents of racism in the way we see things in the world, whether we like it or not.

Whilst I think it's absolutely wrong that you should have to do this, can you shorten your name to sound less 'foreign'? I don't agree with it, by the way, not at all. But if you need a job and this sort of thing still goes on (and it really does, your friend is not that unusual) then you may need to, just to get a job. Terrible as that is.

KiKi

hcb42

I expect your friend is not very good at his job.

I work in a very diverse company (i.e. loads of different nationalities within the team), and we are ramping up so recruiting heavily. we get CVs from all over the world. Every one is read and assessed on its own merits.

prowla

It only takes a few moments to scan a c.v., and you can tell from that whether the person knows their three R's.

thunderb0lt

lol @ "foreign sounding" name.

an9i77

Sadly racism is alive and kicking. I recently had the pleasure of recruiting with a lovely interim manager who refused to consider a candidate with a chinese surname because 'we alreay have one chinese person in the team and I can't understand him'.
Despite the fact that the applicant was from hong kong therefore presumably fluent in english!
When I pointed out to her as politely as I could that we couldn't assume anything about her she said 'oh well she's not been to the right university then if that's what I need to say.'
And this is a senior contract manager on £stupendous per day.
Her name was mud in the HR office for a while, but if she'd been more subtle about it I probably wouldn't even have known she was doing it.
Absolutely terrible. So OP I sympathise if this has been your experience. Don't think much of your experiment though - have you ever heard of 'statistical significance'?

Ronaldo_Mconaldo

The Reed website is a joke. You'd think there was no such thing as a recession with the huge amount of jobs they advertise. Most of the jobs they advertise don't exist or are adverts for other agency web sites who also made up their jobs.

Ash_Pole

an9i77 wrote: »

Don't think much of your experiment though - have you ever heard of 'statistical significance'?

Yes I have - this is what I was alluding to when I said "obviously this is only one data point".

Thanks for all the input. I'm just finding job hunting really frustrating at the moment.

yvonne13_2

OP, I hope you find something soon x