Australian state to trial 'anonymous' job applications to tackle discrimination

An Australian state will remove personal details from job applications in a bid to eliminate discrimination and subconscious bias based on race, religion, gender or background.

In an Australian first, the Victorian government on Friday announced it would trial an 18-month program to strike out an applicant's name, gender, age and location from their resume.

Major government organizations will take part in the trial, including the Department of Premier and Cabinet, Department of Treasury and Finance, WorkSafe, Victoria Police, Australia Post, Westpac, the Transport Accident Commission and VicRoads.

One of the Australia's biggest banks, Westpac, has also signed on voluntarily.

Victoria's Minister for Multicultural Affairs, Robin Scott, has championed the initiative. His wife is of Chinese descent and has occasionally felt compelled to use her anglicized name, Jade Scott, to get job interviews.

When using the pseudonym, the minister claimed his partner was more likely to progress to the next stage of the application process.

"We're not talking about overt bigotry or racism; this is not people who are going to a Reclaim Australia rally," Robin Scott told Fairfax Media on Friday.

"This is a much more subtle process, where we make assumptions about people based on limited information."

A 2010 research paper from the Australian National University backed up the Scott's suggestion that the issue was being felt by people around Australia.

According to the university's research, Australians with a Chinese sounding name had to submit 68 percent more applications to get the same number of interviews as somebody with an Anglo-Saxon-derived name.

Those with Chinese-sounding names appeared to suffer the greatest discrimination in the interview process, followed by Middle Eastern (64 percent more applications), indigenous (35 percent) and Italian (12 percent) Australians.

The pilot program, called Recruit Smarter, will also allocate around 150,000 U.S. dollars to each private-sector company interested in taking part to fund training programs to address hiring bias.