Hiring discrimination, ethnic origin and employment status

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to use the findings of a correspondence testing in order to assess the hiring effects of foreign-origin and employment status in the French construction sector. Design/methodology/approach - To empirically test these features, the author constructs four applications, each representing a particular profile with respect to ethnic origin and employment status. The author sends 1,204 résumés in reply to 301 job vacancies advertised from mid-April to mid-September 2011 in the Paris area. Findings - While being employed increases the performance for applicants of foreign origin, this is not the case for native applicants. However, the benefit of being employed does not fully overcome the penalty created by foreign origin. Hence, the study does not allow to affirm that employed applicants of foreign origin are less penalized than unemployed ones. Originality/value - This paper improves the knowledge of the effects of employment status on employability. The quantification of these effects remains an important issue. To the author’s knowledge, this is the first time correspondence testing has been used to measure the influence of ethnic origin on employability, conditional on employment status.