Inequality in Hiring Decisions: Evaluating Recruitment Decisions with Discrete Choice Experiments

Individual characteristics, such as gender, health and nationality, have often shown to influence recruitment decisions. This study employs the use of discrete choice experiments to investigate how different individual characteristics influence hiring decisions for equally qualified job candidates. Two-hundred-and-fifty-five HRM students in The Netherlands participated in fifteen trials where they had to choose between randomly-generated applicant profiles, which differed on: gender, age, nationality, mental health and physical health status. Afterwards, open questions assessed their experiences with the decision-making process. Results show that older age and stigmatized illnesses (e.g. having recurrent depressions; being HIV- positive) constitute the largest disadvantages for hiring decisions. Participants openly confessed to age-discrimination. This study sheds new light on inequality in hiring decisions and the value of discrete choice experiments to assess this.