Are job applicants in Germany discriminated by their appearance or religious practice? - A lab experiment

This paper investigates effects of appearance and religious practice of job applicants on the hiring decision. We asked participants in our laboratory experiment to select fictitious candidates for an interview from a pool... [ view full abstract ]

This paper investigates effects of appearance and religious practice of job applicants on the hiring decision. We asked participants in our laboratory experiment to select fictitious candidates for an interview from a pool of CVs with comparable characteristics but different photos. One of our main contributions is to demonstrate effects of appearance, ethnicity and religious practice simultaneously. We attempt to uncover relationships between the chance of being selected for an interview and a certain religious practice (veiling) by taking photos of the same Turkish-looking women with and without veil and inserting these photos randomly into comparable CVs. We find heterogeneous effects of appearance, ethnicity and religious practice on selection rates based on characteristics of raters and the time participants spend to look at the photo. Our results indicate a significant discrimination against veiling, particularly among occupations in high skilled sector and jobs with customer contact. Such findings illustrate how characteristics and behaviours of human resources staffs might induce discrimination during the hiring process at firm-level.