The Extent of Resume Whitening

Persistent hiring discrimination as demonstrated by correspondence experiments incites immigrant job candidates and their descendants to modify their resume to hide their immigrant status, that is, resume whitening. To date, we have little to no empirical evidence on how common this is in practice. We test the extent of resume whitening with a representative survey of immigrants in Switzerland (N = 7659). Around 9% of the immigrants used some resume whitening. Immigrants appear to use resume whitening strategically when experiencing or anticipating discrimination. Future correspondence experiments should take this into account to maximize external validity.