Taloussanomat (The Financial Mail) contained an interesting article about a researcher who sent 5,000 job applications with different background names. It was clear from the results that applications submitted under Finnish names ended up in a job interview more often than if the applicant’s name was, for example, Iraqi or Somali.
Personally, I was in Stockholm in the early ’10s working for a few years at a sales firm. The company was a medium-sized sales company with 20-30 employees. Sales were hard-gained, so there was high turnover in the company.
The company got a lot of job applications and one of my job responsibilities was to work with the ”boss group” of the dozens of job applications that were called on-site for a job interview. I wasn’t a big boss in the company, but the lowest boss, Coach.
However, the job applications were gone through together with a ’boss’ group, which included three Swedes, one from Central America but born in Sweden. I was instructed by the boss at the outset to throw away any application that referred to the Middle East or Africa, or if the name sounded like a Muslim name.
It is worth noting at this point that at that time I was not yet a racist, but rather post-confused. I asked what was the basis for such a dump. I myself would have looked at it purely on the basis of my CV.
The Swedes, who were notably not the least bit racists, said that there were only problems. Especially men. The explanation was that men from third countries would start chasing women from day one. Their ability to concentrate is not enough to work when young women are surrounding them in the same room. In addition, the men regard women as inferior, which in turn causes unnecessary brawl in the work environment. Weight on the word unnecessary brawl.
Slightly insecure women who are unable to respond to the hard-hitting attempts of men from developing countries to quit, leave their jobs quickly. Men squeeze their crotch significantly, flavor their lips and lip-smack like porn stars. The more men from the developing world that are in the workplace, the sooner new female workers will spontaneously quit.
Another troublesome factor was reported to be prayer times. As such, no one had any objection to someone being a Muslim, but yoodling Allah at lunch break in the corner of the pause room … it just didn’t fit into the firm’s habits.
To these deeply believing Muslim men, it was not right to say that that prayer could be practiced at home after work, not at work. It would have been the biggest insult in the known universe. This resulted in racial accusations and, in the worst case, the company was dragged to an employment tribunal.
The question is, then: which company wants to voluntarily take the terrible risk of putting a burden on the company. The worst case scenario is the big severance pay. And for someone who, before then, has acted as a cause of multiple resignations.
Hiring third-country nationals, especially men, is such a big risk factor that it is avoided to the last. The employers’ side may be very confused about their basic worldview, but they still try to avoid third-country nationals. Because they want to avoid problems.
Therefore, there is no question of any racism. Just the same thing as my young 18-year-old self, we went to a job interview with a friend as stinking and made-up scarecrows. It is clear that the employer did not want to hire them for work. Starting to impose different requirements for an anonymous job search will only result in job vacancies becoming more difficult to access. Even if a person has a good CV, it can be a terrible risk for an employer to have to welcome a bearded sandal-clown wearing a pajamas.
