Foreign names still close doors in Sweden’s job market
Applicants with names associated with the Middle East or former Yugoslavia had a 30 per cent lower chance of an initial employer response in a Swedish recruitment experiment, a researcher says, as a new report follows a KTH-trained architect who left to find work.
Haya Alshahel, 30, is now doing an architecture internship in Switzerland after repeated job and internship rejections in Sweden, SVT reports. She arrived from Syria in 2014 and studied architecture at Stockholm’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology.
Alshahel says she experienced discrimination and believes political rhetoric made employers more wary of immigrants. The report does not establish why individual employers rejected her.
Stockholm University sociologist Magnus Bygren told SVT that his experiment used thousands of fictional applications. The result concerns first contact, not the probability of being hired, and the report does not establish the study’s publication date.
Bygren points to structured interviews, clear requirements and several assessors as ways to reduce bias. For Alshahel, looking abroad offered a way to support herself and develop her career.
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