Message from Nikki Cicerani, Executive Director

In 2003, a confronting research paper was published entitled, Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination (link to PDF file), summarizing the results of a field experiment conducted to measure racial discrimination in the Boston and Chicago labor markets. In sum, recruiters were significantly less likely to advance the resumes of candidates with an ethnic sounding name, despite possessing qualifications equivalent to "white sounding" named candidates.

In a 2009 study titled Why Do Skilled Immigrants Struggle in the Labor Market (link to PDF file) conducted by the Department of Economics at the University of British Columbia, another dimension of workforce discrimination was surfaced: employer discrimination against resumes which posses either ethnic names or foreign work experience. The findings of this study showed that English-named applicants with degrees from Canadian universities and Canadian work experience received a significantly higher rate of response than resumes with foreign names and foreign education, and international work experience.

In Upwardly Global's experience, there are many barriers to workforce re-entry that immigrant professionals face in the U.S., including lack of professional network and jobseekers' unfamiliarity with the U.S. job search process. However, the same conditions causing discrimination in Canada are likely at work in the U.S. as well, which is an implicit attitudes or unconscious mental associations between a target (such as "immigrants") and a given attribute (such as "poor communication skills"). This implicit attitudes lead to an outcome that negatively impacts professionals with foreign education and work experience.

In the long-run these attitudes and behaviors, whether implicit or not, negatively impact American companies and businesses because they miss the opportunity of hiring highly-qualified immigrants. Data from Manpower 2009 Talent Shortage Survey puts this argument into perspective: although the economy is not thriving and national unemployment at 9.5 percent, 36 percent of employers in America report having difficulty finding sufficient talent to fill positions.

What can employers do? Immigrant inclusive hiring practices can be done with a just little focus. For example, companies can learn how to conduct culturally-competent interviews focused on the immigrant's skills, knowledge, and experience, and create an awareness of the unconscious biases that may exist, leading recruiters or hiring managers to prejudge on the basis of names, foreign degrees, international experience, or different communication styles.

Immigrants comprise the fastest growing segment of the small business and consumer market. In addition, it is estimated that new immigrants and their children will account for 100% of U.S. workforce growth between 2010 and 2030. Together, this creates a business care to focus on the integration of foreign-born professionals into the American workforce today. And with countries like Singapore and the Netherlands taking aggressive steps to strategically attract and integrate foreign-born professionals into their economies, foreign professionals have more choices about where to take their talents.

Hiring a "non-traditional" candidate will always feel like a risk. After all, no one will blame the recruiter or hiring manager who hired the top student from a known US university that didn't work out, but if the candidate from the University of Uyo in Nigeria doesn't work out, the interpretation could be that the recruiter or hiring manager took too much risk in the hire.

Freedom, risk taking, and challenging boundaries has always been core to American values and culture, and have often led to innovation and advancement. However, over the last several years, the United States has taken a disproportionate share of risk in the financial markets for economic gain, the result of which has been the destruction of financial security and value for Americans. Amongst the other adjustments we are making today to learn and recover from the deleterious effects of such a significant imbalance, perhaps it is time to shift some of our risk taking and innovation to the human capital markets and see if we can create a richer society on a new dimension: inclusion.

Nikki Cicerani
Executive Director