Applying for a new role can be challenging and time-consuming and it is especially disheartening when you don’t even get interviews for roles you are perfectly qualified for.

Dr Mladen Adamovic, a Reader in Global Management and Leadership at King’s Business School specialises in workplace inclusion and the career progression of ethnic minorities, discrimination in recruitment, and leadership.

He is particularly focused on how workers can be discriminated against during the hiring process. This formed this basis of one of his most notable research outputs, the Resume Bias Project, which remains the largest international study into recruitment discrimination ever undertaken.

What is the Resume Bias project?

The hallmark of Mladen’s work is his commitment to empirical research, bringing together advanced qualitative and experimental methods to develop insights that have a real-world impact. The Resume Bias project uses this multidimensional approach to understanding the issue of name discrimination and bias in the recruitment process.

Mladen and his team sent over 12,000 job applications to more than 4,000 job adverts across Australia. Making three applications to each listing, the resumes (or CVs in UK English) each listed similar skills and education. The difference was that names on some applications were “English sounding” and others were “non-English sounding”.

The research findings were stark, especially amongst applications for leadership roles.

Of the applications submitted to leadership roles with English names, 26.8% received a callback, compared with only 11.3% of those with non-English sounding names, a reduction of 57.4%. There was also a notable difference for non-leadership roles – those with non-English sounding names received 45.3% fewer callbacks.

Mladen and his colleague Professor Andreas Leibbrandt from Monash University, call this a “glass ceiling” for ethnic minorities. Originally applied to women in the corporate world, the phrase is now used to describe the invisible barriers that confront all marginalised workers.

This glass ceiling is formed by the “Implicit Leadership Theory” whereby people will hire leaders based on a “prototype”, which informs them what a leader “should” be like. These unconsciously biased hiring practices can lead to homogenous working environments and excluding qualified ethnic minority candidates from leadership consideration.

Discrimination during recruitment worldwide

These problems don’t only affect the Australian job market. Mladen reviewed 123 other studies on resume biases which analysed countries across the Western world. Hiring discrimination is a universal problem, and it is well-documented internationally.

Recommendations for a fairer future

Now that employers have both a moral and legal obligation to be treat prospective employees equally, Mladen has recommended a range of techniques that businesses can use.

For him, it is most important that recruiters are given more recruitment and selection training so they can identify their biases as early as possible in the hiring process.

Anonymising CVs can help to an extent, according to Mladen. But doing so can simply delay discrimination until later in the hiring process or cause recruiters to look more harshly at perceivable negatives in an application like gaps between jobs.

As Mladen’s research makes clear, tackling bias in recruitment isn’t just about identifying the problem, it’s about changing the systems that allow it to persist. By rethinking how we assess candidates, training recruiters to recognise their own assumptions, and committing to inclusive practices, organisations can open doors to a more diverse and dynamic workforce.