Access to Employment or Access to Employers: a Descriptive Study of Employers' Attitudes and Practices in Hiring Newcomer Job Seekers

This paper provides a detailed description of employers' attitudes and practices in hiring newcomer job seekers in an attempt to examine the access to employment issue through the lens of employers. It applies social inclusion theory and expands the existing conceptualization in order to answer four key questions: Who are these employers? Who do these employers hire and why? What are current recruiting practices? And how do such practices disadvantage newcomer job seekers, deliberately or inadvertently? Some key findings in this paper include: the disconnect between immigration and skill shortages in the perception of employers leads to their maintaining the status quo in hiring practices; employers' preferred hiring strategies and technologies are constructed on the existing social networks and therefore largely exclude newcomer job seekers; and employers interpret personal attributes based on mainstream social and corporate cultural norms and it disproportionately disadvantages newcomer job seekers.