Are standardized language requirements a useful tool to reduce ethnic hiring discrimination? Pairing web-scraped data with a factorial survey experiment.

We combined web-scraped job vacancy data with a factorial survey experiment in Norway to examine whether employers who set standardized language requirements for their vacancies, based on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) are more prone to hire (fictitious) applicants with different refugee backgrounds than employers who set non-standardized language requirements. We further examined if hiring advantages are due to a skill signal effect (reducing language-based statistical discrimination), a greater personal accountability effect among employers (reducing anti-immigrant attitudes/taste discrimination), or both. Results indicated that CEFR-based requirements may reduce taste-based discrimination specifically for Syrian applicants by increasing personal accountability among employers. We discuss these results in light of several pitfalls associated with introducing CEFR-based requirements that can also pose barriers to labour market integration, some of which at at more structural level. In sum, our results suggest that introducing CEFR-based requirements are most effective by standardizing features in the hiring process that target employers, which should be taken into account when they are introduced to ensure that the responsibility to reduce ethnic discrimination isn’t placed upon the shoulders of immigrants by necessitating additional certification.