Does additional work experience moderate ethnic discrimination in the labour market?

Abstract

Based on employer responses to 6000 job applications, this article tests whether greater work experience lowers discrimination against job applicants of immigrant origin in the Finnish labour market. It does so by comparing the callbacks received in response to two sets of job applications: applications in which applicants of immigrant background had identical work experience as the majority applicant and those in which they had two years’ more experience than the majority candidate. The article further investigates if additional experience elicits more callbacks in jobs in which higher work experience and a vocational diploma are required and when the vacancies are high-skilled. The findings of this empirical investigation suggest the presence of deep-seated ethnic hierarchies in the Finnish labour market. They clearly demonstrate that immigrants’ chances of securing a job interview offer do not significantly change even when they possess substantially greater work experience than their majority counterparts.

Does the size of foreign population in a city affect the level of labour‐market discrimination against job applicants of migrant origin?

“…In order to examine if slight variations in age, the style of the job application letter, the style of CV and the job application sending order had any effect on receiving a callback from the employer, cross tabulations and the chi square tests of independence were conducted. As reported elsewhere (Ahmad, 2020b ), these variations did not exert any statistically significant effect on the chances of getting invited to an interview.…”

“…Hypothesis 3b does not find any support in the results, as required job skill level or face-to-face contact with customers do not obtain significant parameters in Table 3. As reported elsewhere (Ahmad, 2020b(Ahmad, , 2020c, other relevant variables such as work experience required for the job and required Finnish-language proficiency were also tested in attempts to place the phenomenon of discrimination in the social structure and to make understandable the mechanisms producing it. They did not, however, explain variation in discrimination in models where the ethnic background of applicants was included.…”

“…They did not, however, explain variation in discrimination in models where the ethnic background of applicants was included. Even in cases where applicants of migrant origin possessed a 2‐year additional experience more than the Finnish applicants, it did not provide them a significant edge over the majority candidates (Ahmad, 2020b ).…”