Fairness toward job applicants differing in gender and ethnicity in a video‐based assessment interview was explored. For this purpose, 103 female and 105 male participants, including 38 who declared to have a migration background of their own, rated a behavior anchored rating scale after having watched the videotaped answers of a potential applicant. The domains assessed were communication skills and the capacity to work in a team. The videos of the applicants were generated with the help of standardized scripts and semi‐professional actors. Eight videos were made operationalizing a two (Turkish migration background–native German) by two (male–female) by two (more positive applicant answers–moderately good applicant answers) experimental design. A multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) revealed a small to moderate main effect only for migration background of the applicants. Subsequent ANOVAs found that in three of the four dependent variables this effect reached significance of p < .05. The effects were robust against consideration of the raters’ agreeableness and the raters’ own migration background as covariates. Applicants with Turkish background scored higher in the evaluation of their videotaped answers than German native applicants did. Social Identity Theory (Taijfel & Turner, ) provides an approach to integrate these findings.
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People from marginalized groups are often discriminated against in traditional recruitment processes. Yet as companies faced with skill shortages change their recruitment strategies, the question arises as to whether modern recruitment trends such as the use of professional social network sites, active sourcing, and recruitment assignment to external agencies are affected by implicit or explicit discrimination. In our mixed-method study, we first conducted expert interviews with different types of recruiters to explore the potential for discrimination in the modern recruitment process. We then analyzed panel data from the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) in Germany to see whether there is quantitative evidence of discrimination in modern recruitment. A content analysis of the interviews shows that active sourcing and assignment of recruitment to private agencies are potentially affected by explicit discrimination. We identified three sources of discrimination in personnel selection: recruiters’ own attitudes, explicit instructions from managers, and the recruiters’ assumptions regarding companies’ preferred candidates. The results of mixed multilevel analyses with the company as a second level resonate with the qualitative findings: companies actively approach female employees, older employees, and employees who are born in Southern/Eastern Europe less often and offer women jobs less often. The effects for gender were still significant when we included far-right voting as a moderator variable on the employee level, but the interactions were not significant. Effects for gender and older people in active sourcing were also significant and robust when controlling for income, number of children, level of school completion, and educational background. Our findings suggest that current legislation may be insufficient to protect candidates who belong to marginalized groups from discrimination in modern recruitment.
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