Many companies regularly look up job applicants online as part of the hiring process. A new study suggests they may also use what they find to discriminate.
The study, a Carnegie Mellon University experiment involving dummy résumés and social-media profiles, found that between 10% and a third of U.S. firms searched social networks for job applicants’ information early in the hiring process. In those cases, candidates whose public Facebook profiles indicated they were Muslim were less likely to be called for interviews than Christian applicants. The difference was particularly pronounced in parts of the country where more people identify themselves as conservative. In those places, Christian applicants got callbacks 17% of the time, compared with about 2% for Muslims…
Muslim applicants received 14% fewer callbacks nationwide, but because of the small number of employers offering interviews to any people at all, this difference wasn’t statistically significant. Significant advantages for Christian candidates as compared with Muslims were clear when researchers looked at the 10 states—Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming—that were most strongly conservative based on 2012 election data.
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