The coloniality of employment selection processes: Black Africa-born migrants’ experiences of job-seeking in (White) Australia

Abstract

Africa-born migrants in Australia, particularly those who are racialised Black, face significant challenges in securing employment that aligns with their qualifications and experience, leading to higher rates of unemployment and underemployment compared to other population groups. This study explores the employment-seeking experiences of Black Africa-born migrants in South Australia, focusing on how coloniality – understood as the enduring power dynamics established during colonialism – shapes recruitment and selection processes. Drawing on focus group data from 32 participants, we examine how coloniality manifests through the devaluation of qualifications, racialized assumptions, and systemic barriers in the labour market. We argue that these processes reinforce a coloniality of employment selection, where Black Africa-born migrants are marginalised and relegated to lower-status roles. This research bridges macro-theorizing on coloniality with the micro-level experiences of job seekers, highlighting the need for coloniality-cognizant approaches to address these inequities in employment practices. The study contributes to a growing body of work that seeks to expose and challenge the ongoing reproduction of colonial power structures in contemporary labour markets.

Keywords

African migrants Australia employment job-seeking racism and discrimination

Introduction

Africa-born migrants in Australia, particularly those who are racialised Black, face significant challenges in finding employment that reflects their knowledge, skills and experience (Kalemba, 2023; Udah and Singh, 2018). Africa-born people in Australia currently experience both higher levels of unemployment and under-employment than other sections of the population.¹ For example, in October 2022, unemployment rates were significantly higher for Africa-born migrants compared to the Australia-born population and migrant groups from other regions of the world (4% for ‘Sub-Saharan’ and 7% for ‘North Africa and the Middle East’ compared with 3.4% for Australia-born and 2.3% to 3% for all other regions of the world) (ABS, 2022). Research has identified a range of barriers to employment for Africa-born people in Australia, such as English language skills (Abdelkerim and Grace, 2012; Hebbani and Preece, 2015; Ibrahim et al., 2010); race-based discrimination (Abur and Spaaij, 2016; Losoncz, 2017; Udah et al., 2019); limited social networks beyond their ethnic community (Correa-Velez et al., 2015); insufficient or ineffective job-seeker services and supports (Torezani et al., 2008); insufficient recognised (local) work experience and qualifications (Colic-Peisker and Tilbury, 2006; Delaporte and Piracha, 2018); gendered barriers for women including caring responsibilities, childcare access, support networks (Farrugia, 2020; Gaillard and Hughes, 2014); limited knowledge of local employment context and processes (Hebbani and Khawaja, 2018; Newman et al., 2018); problems created by geography, such as poor access to transport (Correa-Velez et al., 2015) or poor access to services for those settled in rural areas (Boese, 2013; Correa-Velez and Onsando, 2009); as well as pre- and post-migration trauma and health issues (Hebbani and Khawaja, 2018). Our research sought to understand the employment-seeking experiences of Black Africa-born people in the state of South Australia, a state where limited research has been undertaken with this population group. Our research also specifically focussed on the experiences of participants in seeking employment and navigating recruitment processes.

The classic account of the recruitment and selection process describes an objective and technical process where an employer undertakes some form of workforce planning and job analysis to identify the organisation's needs in terms of job characteristics and the specific sets of knowledge, skills and abilities (KSAOs) required (Brannick et al,, 2019). Recruitment may be informal – reliant on word of mouth, strong or weak ties; social media based; or conducted more formally, for example via public and private commercial job boards and professional association newsletters (Ma and Allen, 2009). Recruitment material – including decisions made about recruitment material language, imagery and the means used to handle applications – will be designed to cost-efficiently maximise the applicant pool (Barber, 1998; Golubovich and Ryan, 2022). Pre-set criteria determine which applications are to be culled, with successful candidates then moving to selection process stages which are most likely to include some form of interviews, and other evaluations such as psychometric or work-testing (see, e.g. chapters 8 and 9 of Taylor, 2022). In the usual account of this process, it is assumed that an employer will seek out and hire the best candidates, looking at the potential employee's KSAOs and suitability for the job and organisation (Judge and Kammeyer-Mueller, 2022). Applicants possessing the human capital perceived to fit the role and organisation are assumed to be more productive, require less training and improve the productivity of the organisation, and are therefore more likely to be selected.

The experiences of Africa-born job seekers illustrate the limitations of the human capital and discrimination accounts of job search, and the assumption that a ‘rational and technical’ process of recruitment and selection will necessarily identify the best candidate effectively. Instead of filling organisational vacancies with the ‘best’ knowledge, skills and experience, recruiters arguably undertake a series of subjective assessments about applicants’ capabilities which are ultimately shaped by hegemonically White norms and assumptions of institutions and individuals undertaking the recruitment and selection processes for those institutions. A human capital lens fails to explain why racialized workers with equivalent (or superior) credentials still experience worse employment outcomes (Oreopoulos, 2011). A coloniality lens, in contrast, situates employment disparities within historical and structural power relations (Ashiagbor, 2021). It argues that labour markets are not neutral but instead continue to privilege Whiteness and devalue knowledge, credentials and skills from the Global South (Quijano, 2000). Coloniality highlights that the issue is not just about “fixing” workers (e.g., retraining or credential recognition) but dismantling structural labour market hierarchies that prioritise Western capital and Whiteness.

Our empirical data with 32 Africa-born focus group participants in South Australia highlighted how the employment-seeking experiences of Black Africa-born migrants in Australia are shaped by ways of ‘knowing about’ and making judgements of Black African employment seekers that are grounded in coloniality. We understand coloniality as referring to ‘long-standing’ patterns of power that ensure the continuation of colonial social and labour market relationships (Maldonado-Torres, 2007). In recent years, management researchers have increasingly acknowledged the importance of coloniality in management theory. Banerjee (2022), for example, has argued ‘there is an epistemic blindness in most management theories because histories of race, racism and colonialism are excluded or glossed over’ (p. 1074). Researchers prompted by this concern have begun to develop coloniality-cognisant theories of management practice (Banerjee, 2022; Jammulamadaka et al., 2021), such as the ‘coloniality of labor’ (Gutierrez-Rodriguez, 2014; Kalemba, 2023) and the ‘coloniality of work’ (Limki, 2018). These theories recognise the long history of the racialized division of labour and its impact on the present, in which those who are racialized non-White, or colonised populations, were the most exploited and oppressed workers (Grosfoguel, 2007).

Our article builds upon these contributions to respond to Greedharry et al.’s (2023) call for research which shows ‘a meaningful and substantive connection between the micro-encounters of racism and racialization and the macro-structures of coloniality’ (p. 461). Through focussing on the ways in which coloniality operates as ‘a set of power relations that organize the present’ (Greedharry et al., 2023: 460) in experiences of employment selection, we argue for the existence of a coloniality of employment selection processes. Our article provides a bridge between the macro-theorising about the need for coloniality-cognisant theory, and the micro-practices resulting in lived experience, specifically in relation to employment selection. Our study demonstrates the ways in which long-standing global patterns of power continue to inform social norms, attitudes and values that shape employment selection processes, and how these are experienced in the local context of South Australia. Following Zembylas (2023), we argue that identifying the ways in which the ‘incessant reproduction’ of coloniality operates is essential to interrupting its influence. Through identifying the ways in which coloniality of employment selection processes operate as a form of ‘incessant reproduction’ to marginalise Black Africa-born people in employment seeking in Australia, we illustrate how normalised recruitment practices operate to reproduce and reinscribe coloniality. By focussing specifically on how coloniality is experienced in selection processes, we illustrate the ongoing barriers to accessing employment for Black Africa-born people in Australia.

In this article, we begin by considering existing understandings of the coloniality of labour and work before giving some context of Black Africa-born migration to Australia. We then introduce our conceptual framing using the coloniality of power, knowledge and being as a lens for understanding employment selection processes. Next, we consider that data from the focus groups undertaken in our study and illustrate the ways in which the experiences of Black Africa-born migrants demonstrate coloniality of power, knowledge and being in employment selection processes.

Coloniality of labour and work

The field of Management and Organization Studies (MOS) has only recently begun to grapple with concepts of race and coloniality more rigorously (Greedharry et al., 2023; Jammulamadaka et al., 2021). While earlier research identified that racially based differences exist in employment and employment processes, little was understood ‘about the mechanisms that perpetuate and sustain those differences’ (Proudford and Nkomo, 2006: 335). Contemporary research in MOS has aimed to ‘describe how this difference is produced and experienced in organizations through relations of power; and how history continues to play out in organizations in racial terms’ (Greedharry et al., 2023: 458). MOS, to-date, has considered coloniality through two main lenses – ‘coloniality of labour’ (Gutierrez-Rodriguez, 2014; Kalemba, 2023) and ‘coloniality of work’ (Limki, 2018). These two terms highlight similar key themes, with the main distinction being that the coloniality of labour is focussed on exploitation within global capitalist systems, while coloniality of work also provides a framework to consider unpaid and undervalued forms of work (i.e., Limki’s (2018) illustration of commercial surrogacy in India as a form of coloniality of work). Coloniality of work/labour examines how legacies and practices grounded in colonisation continue to shape power relations, labour dynamics and economic structures. Colonial hierarchies ‘remain in place and are entangled with the international division of labor’ (Grosfoguel, 2002: 205), with colonial systems of exploitation and control persisting in modern forms of labour organisation and capitalism.

Racial hierarchies are inherently implicated in the ways in which coloniality operates (Quijano, 2007: 171). The creation of racial hierarchies enabled the justification of forced labour systems, such as slavery and indentured servitude, through ‘scientific’ definitions of which bodies were best suited to which forms of work. These forces established patterns of racialized labour exploitation which continue to be experienced globally today (Prasad, 2023; Quijano, 2000; Virdee, 2019). Modern global capitalism has continued to perpetuate colonial labour dynamics, with workers in the Global South continuing to be exploited by transnational corporations (Mignolo, 2011), and migrant workers from former colonies frequently occupying low-wage, precarious jobs and experiencing discrimination and limited rights in the Global North (Bhattacharya, 2018). A recent Special Section in the journal Gender, Work and Organisation presents a range of articles which consider the ways in which coloniality operates in areas of MOS. These range from autoethnographic articles that illustrate how coloniality operates on the racialized subject in employment (i.e. Sobande and Wells, 2023), to international examples of the role of coloniality in organising labour through the maintenance of racializing norms (i.e. Kalemba, 2023; Stevano, 2023). While these articles broadly consider aspects of coloniality of labour/work, limited research has explicitly considered coloniality in relation to recruitment processes.

Bolokan’s (2024) recent article does focus on recruitment, through a consideration of how recruitment and treatment of agricultural workers in Switzerland continues to be shaped by subjugation of those racialized non-White under modern power structures. They argue that what they refer to as ‘plantation practices and discourses’ remain powerful ways of continuing to enforce ‘agricultural racial capitalism’ (p. 256). Through ethnography and interviews with agricultural recruiters they illustrate that recruiters ‘think-like the-market’ – in a way which is both a product and reinforcer of coloniality. Recruiters for agricultural work used racialized ways of knowing about ‘those from Africa’ or ‘refugees’ alongside their conceptions of racialised and ethnicised categories and stereotypes to make decisions about whether farmworkers would possess the right skills, what type of roles they should occupy and what wages they might accept. In this Swiss data, those from Africa were positioned with presumed values, work ethic and abilities through forms of racial grammar, that saw them located as the lowest on the hierarchy of desirable employee. Bolokan describes the language of the recruiters as displaying a ‘colonial legacy of recruitment practices and a colonial-racist mind-set’ (p. 266) through which colonial ways of knowing about the racialized subject become common sense. Our research builds on this international research and focuses on how coloniality, specifically in relation to recruitment processes, is experienced by Black Africa-born job seekers in Australia.

Black Africa-born migration to (White) settler colonial Australia

Coloniality is also an implicit part of migration underpinned through the ways in which colonial empires and settler-colonies were established and their continued legacies. While coloniality is a global phenomenon, there are localised ways in which this is configured. Our study is focussed on Black Africa-born migrants in Australia, a country which has a history of racialisation which formed the very foundations of the colonising process and the dehumanisation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples (Moreton-Robinson, 2015). This continued through restrictive migration policies, where until 1973, migration to Australia was controlled by the ‘White Australia’ policy, which ensured that most migrants were of white European descent (Jupp, 2002). The 1970s and 1980s saw a shift in migration to include people from Asia, South America and the Middle East, and from the late 1990s, the African continent. By 2022, 416,150 people (1.6% of the Australian population) were born in sub-Saharan Africa, an increase of 250% since 1996 (ABS, 2023). Black Africans have typically arrived in Australia due to legacies of coloniality, often leaving a context of coloniality in the African continent and arriving to another context of coloniality in Australia. Some arrive as humanitarian entrants or refugees, having fled their countries because of conflicts resulting from colonisation and the decolonising processes. Others arrived as skilled migrants or international students, having utilised African-acquired educational and skills-based resources to enable migration to the Global North.

The Africa-born population represents a small minority of migrants. However, their visible difference is especially significant given Australia's history of Whiteness (Baak, 2016; Moreton-Robinson, 2015). In settler colonial nations such as Australia, ‘the structure of settler colonialism has undergirded ideologies of White supremacy, in which White skin and White ways of knowing and being are constructed as both superior and normal’ (Tuck and Guishard, 2013: 12). Those migrating from former colonies continue to experience coloniality after their migration to Global North locations through ‘their current stereotypical representation in the European imagination which is reflected in their subordinated location in the metropolitan labor market’ (Grosfoguel, 1999: 414). Mapedzahama and Kwansah-Aidoo (2017: 2) have argued that Black Africans in Australia are positioned in contradiction to Whiteness which ‘assigns them to the margins of society’ within the context of power relations. Further, they theorise Blackness in Australia to be a burden for people of African descent for three key reasons. First, the range of negative situations people experience because of their skin colour. Second, the ‘ongoing and constant experience of discrimination, marginalization, and disempowerment’ which imposes ‘a unique kind of burden which is both “symbolic” and “material”’. Finally, deficit discourses imposed on Black Africans results in racism and marginalisation but also in self-recognised, internalised acknowledgements of these deficits (Mapedzahama and Kwansah-Aidoo, 2017: 5).

Given the racialized history of Australia, it is not surprising that African-born migrants have experienced difficulties accessing the Australian job market. While there has been extensive research into some of the barriers to employment seeking for this group, as outlined in the introduction, little consideration has been given to the ways in which coloniality influences the recruitment and selection of Black African job seekers in white settler colonial nations. Given the legacy of coloniality in settler colonial Australia, this is an important area for further exploration.

Conceptual framework: coloniality of power, knowledge and being

In our study, we build from the broad theoretical concepts of coloniality of labour and work, to identify how three intertwined aspects of coloniality operate more explicitly in recruitment selection processes. We now turn to consider in more detail these three intertwined aspects of coloniality: the coloniality of power, of knowledge and being.

The coloniality of power relates to ‘a system in which race serves as the most basic criterion for the social and economic classification of peoples, and the consequent hierarchies serve the expansion of western capitalism and entrench the subordination of people of colour through unjust divisions of labour’ (Balaton-Chrimes and Stead, 2017: 9). Here coloniality sees Europeans as the usual and legitimate agents of capitalist activity (Mignolo, 2007; Quijano, 2000). In recruitment and selection processes, this form of coloniality operates to establish the normality of a racialised allocation of job opportunity and employment, with some groups seen to be leaders and initiators and others seen to be supporters and labourers.

The coloniality of knowledge focuses on epistemological issues enabling consideration of how knowledge is generated and by whom, and how it is legitimated (Quijano, 2007). Here the colonial way of thinking about the world – such as social position, economic roles and ethics – is hegemonic, and prevails over other forms of knowledge. Our research illustrates that in the selection process, this operates through mechanisms such as the under-recognition of qualifications and experience of non-dominant groups, such as through ‘skill-discounting’.

Finally, the coloniality of being is exhibited through the invisibility and dehumanisation of Black, Indigenous and people of colour (Maldonado-Torres, 2007). Sylvia Wynter (2003) traces the genealogy of ‘Man’, arguing that the Eurocentric concept of ‘Man’ reflects a Western humanity that has been used to justify Black oppression and dehumanisation. Through the coloniality of being, Black subjectivity is denied, producing a ‘hostile context that militates against black human existence’ (Ndlovu, 2020: 13). In recruitment and selection processes, the coloniality of being acts to render those who are visibly different from the White hegemonic norm as relatively invisible and undeserving of employment into senior or professional roles from the perspective of recruiters.

Maldonado-Torres (2016) has argued that ‘modernity/coloniality is a peculiar construction of knowledge, power and being that divides the world into zones of being and not-being human’ (p. 19). He further explains that the ‘subject who appears at the crux of the coloniality of power, the coloniality of knowledge and the coloniality of being’ (p. 20) is the damnés referred to by Fanon (1963). We use Figure 1 to illustrate this understanding of crux of the coloniality of power, knowledge and being. While coloniality of power, knowledge and being have been identified as three distinct concepts, the ways in which they overlap and interweave makes it impossible to clearly delineate when each distinct form is operating. In fact, multiple forms of coloniality underpin any given experience of participants in our study. As such, we do not attempt to categorise particular experiences as necessarily reflecting specific forms of coloniality. Rather we illustrate the multiple ways in which the coloniality of employment selection processes are experienced. We will return to this in the findings and conclusion of the article to argue that in settler colonial Australia, Black Africa-born migrants are located as the damnés through employment selection processes resulting in a racialized division of labour.

Figure 1.

Adapted from Lentin (2022) drawing on the work of Maldonado-Torres (2007, 2016).

Research approach

After obtaining ethics approval from the University of South Australia Human Research Ethics Committee, data was collected from five focus groups involving a total of 32 participants. Focus groups were selected as an appropriate research method as they enabled participants to build on and question each other's experiences, in addition, they enabled the researchers to hear similarities and differences across a range of experiences in a short time frame (Parker and Tritter, 2006). Participants were recruited through three partner organisations, Australian Migrant Resource Centre, African Communities Council of South Australia, and African Student Council of South Australia, as well as by members of the research team. While the overall number of participants was relatively small, the diversity in terms of gender, age, country of birth, migration pathway, recency of arrival in Australia, qualifications and employment experiences was seen to represent the broader diversity of this group as identified in Census data (ABS, 2023). In addition, the repetition of similar experiences of employment seeking across the participants in the focus groups illustrated that this number of participants was sufficient to garner a deep understanding of the themes explored in this article. Each focus group ran for approximately 1 hour, with between 4 and 10 participants in each group. Semi-structured questions covered participant demographics, employment status and various aspects of people's employment seeking experiences. Questions included: Are you currently working in the type of employment that you would like to hold and that you feel fits with your qualifications? What helped you to find your current job? What were some of the challenges in seeking employment? What were some of the things you found helpful when seeking employment? All focus groups were recorded and transcribed in full.

Transcripts of the focus groups were individually and collaboratively analysed by all members of the research team. We met regularly to discuss the similar and differing analytic lenses that we brought to the analysis. Key themes were identified through meetings with the research team and further analysis was undertaken when writing the publications that have resulted from the project. This reflexive, inductive, thematic approach enabled us to identify key experiences shared across focus group members, as well as experiences that may have been unique to individuals or smaller numbers of participants (Braun and Clarke, 2019). This article focusses on themes relating to recognition of qualifications, and supports and barriers to employment seeking, which illustrate the ways in which coloniality operated in the employment selection processes experienced by participants.

Three members of the research team are Africa-born migrants. Two members of the research team are White Australia-born women, one team member is a White Australia-born man, and the final team member is a White UK-born migrant. While it is beyond the scope of this article to reflect in depth on how positionalityof research team members influenced the research, it is important that we acknowledge that it had significant impact at all stages of the research. Researcher positionality shaped the relationships with the partner organisations, the questions developed for the focus groups, the recruitment of participants for the focus groups, the conducting of the focus groups and the analysis and writing of publications. All of the focus groups were organised and coordinated by an Africa-born member of the research team who was present at each focus group.

We use the label ‘Black African-born migrants’ to capture a group with broad experiences of migration to Australia. The majority had arrived in Australia on refugee and humanitarian visas, with the remainder having arrived on family, student or skilled visas, however all participants had permanent residency so their visa status in no way affected their employability. No difference was observed between people who had come to Australia through the different migration pathways and their experiences of employment seeking. Therefore, it was deemed appropriate to consider these groups under the same label. In addition, Census and other employment related data captures only the birth country of people, rather than visa status or migration pathway, as such this data similarly reflects the label ‘Africa-born migrants’.

All participants in the research were Africa-born, had sought employment in South Australia and were currently of working age. Most participants were born in Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, South Sudan and Liberia, with the remainder born in Eritrea, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. Participants had been in Australia for between 2 to 17 years, with over 60% having been in Australia for more than 10 years (average: 10.3 years); 59% of participants identified as female, with the remainder identifying as male; 53% of participants were working at the time of the focus groups, 33% were unemployed and the remainder were not participating in the workforce.

Coloniality of power, knowledge and being in selection processes for Black Africa-born migrants

All participants shared frustrations about the difficulties they had experienced in finding work. The common thread between participants was their experiences of ‘being Black’ in the Australian labour market. Participants were cognisant of the racialised social context in Australia in which ‘being Black’ is steeped in negative or deficit stereotypes (Colic-Peisker, 2005; Phillips, 2011), and the implications of this for job seeking. Participants acutely felt that perceptions of ‘Africans’ or of ‘Black people’ in Australia negatively impacted their chances of finding work, with many pointing to negative or inflammatory media portrayals and how this impacted entire communities (Colic-Peisker and Tilbury, 2008; Macaulay and Deppeler, 2020). Patrice² stated:

If you’re Black you’re disadvantaged… It's nothing you can really point to, but you can feel it; it is there.

Patrice's comment illustrates the invisible and structural ways in which coloniality operates – ‘it's nothing you can really point to’, alongside the affective dimensions of how racism and coloniality are experience – ‘you can feel it; it is there’. It highlights the slipperiness of how coloniality is experienced in employment seeking, which we aim to more clearly identify in the subsections that follow. Below, we illustrate how the coloniality of knowledge, power and being operate in the job seeking experiences of Africa-born participants. We highlight the ways in which knowledge is dismissed when held by Black bodies, how Black bodies as constructed as ‘out of place’ in the White spaces of employment recruitment, and how proximity to Whiteness through name, accent, friendships and behaviours are viewed as key to successfully navigating recruitment processes.

‘I’m a man of certificates…with no job’: Dismissal of knowledges, qualifications, under-employment and job settling

For participants in this study, the difficulty in finding suitable employment could not be attributed to a lack or misrecognition of qualifications. Almost two-thirds of participants had been in Australia for 10 years or more and 72% held a vocational or university-level qualification or were currently studying at university. 44% held a bachelor's degree or higher or were undertaking a bachelor's degree at the time of the focus groups. The majority (88%) had attained their highest qualification from Australian institutions. Focus group discussions illustrated frustrations about the lack of connection between qualifications and work in their intended field. John described his experience:

Before they were telling you: “You don’t have a qualification”. You go there – and study is a commitment, not just commitment physically, it's mentally also, and financially – you put those together [and] when you finish you come back, you have [the] qualification, they will tell you [that you] are over-qualified.

Indeed, many participants had multiple qualifications – particularly industry-targeted vocational certificates – but struggled to convert these into employment outcomes. One participant, Mosi, did not currently have a job despite applying for over 500 jobs. He held a Certificate IV in Community Services, Diploma of Community Services, Diploma of Counselling, Diploma in Youth Work, had partially completed a Bachelor of Media and Communication and was enrolled in a course to become a disability support worker. Mosi described his rationale for attaining yet another qualification:

I was thinking maybe I don’t want to do it – even my wife asked me, “Why you waste your time with certificates? How many certificates do you need and why you have to do it again?” I said “Then let me try because maybe, you never know, maybe I will get a job.”… It is very confusing sometimes when you have a qualification that you think you will do something… I'm a man of certificates … with no job.

This lack of connection between qualifications and jobs was corroborated by a community worker attending one of the focus groups, who said: ‘People come to me and they have all these certificates …but there's not that connection pathway to get a job’. While the under-utilisation of qualifications by migrants in Australia may be a broader issue (Delaporte and Piracha, 2018; Ressia et al., 2017), the narratives of our participants sadly echo a study from 2006 that found that ‘working below qualifications is endemic among black Africans and that even people who upgraded their qualifications in Australia could not find jobs at an appropriate level’ (Colic-Peisker and Tilbury, 2006: 213).³ It is concerning to see that over 15 years after this earlier research was conducted, in a period in which the African-Australian community is much more significantly established, under-employment continues to be an issue. The fact that the participants held locally acquired qualifications but could not translate these into employment in aligned areas of work demonstrates that it is the body that holds the knowledge rather than knowledge itself that is valued. Even when the knowledge acquired is presented as ‘White’, that is, the knowledge was acquired in Australian institutions, it comes in the package of a Black body and is therefore dismissed. This illustrates the coloniality of knowledge in selection processes through a devaluing of who is seen to hold legitimate knowledge. The Black body is read by employers as not holding legitimate knowledge despite the learning of knowledge in White institutions.

As Boese (2013: 149) writes of South Sudanese job seekers in Australia: ‘[t]he association of blackness with a lack of education and skills neatly ties in with historical, racist stereotypes about people from African backgrounds’. Even when, on paper, these assumptions of educational deficit are discredited, the ‘association of blackness with a lack of education’ means that qualifications held by people who are Black are somehow discredited or undermined by recruiters.

‘There’s not going to be many people like you in that room’: being Black in White spaces

The Africa-born job seekers noted the ways in which recruiters responded to the visibility of their Blackness. They suggested that it did not matter whether they were seeking employment in a White dominated organisation or trying to set up a business that was reliant on White customers, their skin mattered. As Adem reflected:

I know what other Africans have tried to do to run away from the racism; tried to do their own things where they can be their own bosses. Still, even…to get a cleaning contract over here, even putting up a tender there, still your skin matters.

Daniel (2018) writes of what she refers to as ‘this marker I call my body’ where she theorises how Black women are positioned through coloniality and racism in universities. Adem reflects on how his body is marked through racialisation. Even when trying to run away from the racism experienced in employment and recruitment by setting up their own business, Black skin is marked and positioned as inferior or ‘unfit’ for certain types of work. Other participants noted that perceptions of them and their bodies determined what kind of role they were seen as being employable in. For example, Elizabeth identified that:

I can have the friendliest smile in a room, but my presence is somewhat intimidating to even be a receptionist, because a receptionist [is] the first contact someone sees. They don’t want that face for their company.

This was a shared experience for several participants who experienced applying for work in public-facing jobs but instead being ‘sent to the kitchen to go and do the dishes’ because ‘the face that someone sees’ matters. Implied in this is the lack of acceptability of faces that are Black. This unacceptability of Blackness demonstrates the coloniality of being through the objectification and dehumanisation of Black bodies in opposition to the acceptability of Whiteness.

This sense of being ‘too Black’ to be acceptable to prospective employers or for customer facing roles impacted not only job seekers’ experiences of applying for work, but also how they understood their own employability and the kinds of jobs they should even apply for, what Losoncz (2017) labels ‘retreatism’. As one young woman, Miriam, described:

…there were three, four stages of this interviewing process, three of them online. So you just do it and I think I’m good for this job. And then there's: “Oh, we have a meeting in person …” and there's just that moment of, “Oh, they’re going to see me!” and that uneasiness is really strange.

Fellow focus group members agreed wholeheartedly with this telling, providing their own accounts of self-censorship and doubt relating to the perceived and received acceptability of their appearance (Blackness), accent or name which marked them as ‘not White’. Coloniality operates through the ways in which the ‘self-image of peoples’ and ‘aspirations of self’ (Maldonado-Torres, 2007: 243) are negatively impacted. Hakim continued this conversation:

The interesting thing is there doesn’t even have to be a real problem between any two people, but just the fact that I’m meeting someone new, this is something that happens every time because it's… I guess it's baggage that you carry.

This idea of Blackness as ‘baggage’ or as ‘burdensome’, as Mapedzahama and Kwansah-Aidoo (2017: 10) label it, frames interactions with White people. This ‘burden arises from the fact that they have no control over the negativity that is attached to their bodies (blackness)’ (Mapedzahama and Kwansah-Aidoo, 2017: 10). Through this bodily baggage, Ibrahim (2004: 84) articulates that ‘[o]ur bodies cheat us all the time, what they “say” is almost always unknown since they “say” things that they do not intend’. Without even speaking, the Black body in White spaces of employment is recognised as not belonging or being constrained to undertake certain (non-public facing) roles. Black Africa-born migrants are aware of the ways in which their Blackness is viewed and interpreted by recruiters. In response, they seek to accommodate by bending to Whiteness or making moves to pass as White, which will be explored below, or through sheer hard work that might somehow see their achievements recognised in ways that counter the perceived deficit of Blackness. As Miriam stated, ‘You have to work harder than everybody else in that room because there's not going to be many people like you in that room’. She suggests that ‘you’ (the African/Black person) have to work harder to prove yourself in an interview or recruitment panels because of existing prejudicial assumptions about being less or in deficit.

For one woman, Lucy, being identified as ‘Black’ was enough to exclude her from a recruitment process:

The third question [on the online job application] is: “What is your country of birth”. What does it have to do [with] me [as] a citizen of Australia for five years? So even this, I don’t know, already the system, the structure, the way it is… the moment I write I’m a Kenyan I’m out, [because], you know… “this person is a Black person”.

Whether based on physical identification of Blackness during interviews or assumed Blackness through job applications in which country of birth was equated with Blackness, participants’ experiences highlighted the ways in which “‘the corporeal schema’ is already racialized” (Ahmed, 2007: 153). As Ahmed has argued, drawing on the work of Fanon (1986) ‘race does not just interrupt such a schema, but structures its mode of operation… bodies are shaped by histories of colonialism, which makes the world ‘white’” (Ahmed, 2007: 153). Dei (2018: 129) refers to this as the ‘Black-White paradigm’ which ‘sees Whiteness and White identity as the yardstick to which everything else is problematically measured or referenced to’. Coloniality of being was present in the selection processes through which Black applicants were seen to not meet the yardstick when measured against White applicants. The Black–White paradigm enables a ‘lens of reading social relations as relations of power where proximity to Whiteness is rewarded and the closer proximity to Blackness is punished’ (Dei, 2018: 129). Below, we consider how this proximity to Whiteness was operationalised to counter the Blackness that was seen to limit employment opportunities.

Passing as White until seen: accent and name

Many authors have written about ‘passing as White’ and proximity to Whiteness in relation to how race is embodied through phenotypic characteristics (i.e. Harris, 1993; Piper, 2022). However, coloniality has also been identified as operating through forms of linguistic racism, where non-White accents or ways of speaking are viewed as deficient or defective against hegemonic norms (Cushing, 2023). Our participants described how accents as well as their names became markers of the Black-White paradigm, further evidencing the coloniality of being in employment seeking. One exchange about ‘passing for White’ in a focus group of young people who had grown up in Australia was particularly illuminating. Here, participants shared experiences of changing names in applications to sound more ‘Anglo’, or of having names that were presumed ‘Anglo’ and of getting job interviews after phone conversations in which the prospective employer assumed they were White. In this excerpt from the conversation, Jane describes how her name and accent resulted in people assuming Whiteness.

I’ve got so many times, when people talk to me on the phone and for some reason they picture a White, tall woman and they get a short, Black girl. There are times where and even my name in itself … like Jane Brown… When I went for my final placement last year this girl was like “Okay can I be very honest with you?… When I was reading your application and I read your name I actually thought you were middle-aged Caucasian woman”. I know I can sound White sometimes, but it didn’t used to bother me until when she brought that up. Now I feel like within society I’m viewed in a certain way, now I have to present myself in a certain way.

Being assumed White based on her name and accent resulted in Jane feeling that she had to ‘present herself in a certain way’ (i.e. performing Whiteness) that fitted with how society perceived her.

Attributes such as names and accents can be perceived by employers to be markers of Whiteness, with names and accents which are perceived as White being also attributed to assumptions about nationality, levels of education and expected salary (Cotton et al., 2014: 407). Participants recognised this, with one participant identifying ‘if you’re talking with a particular accent or you sound White, you sound educated’. The awareness that participants had of the capital that White names and accents bought them in White employment spaces meant that many were actively bending to Whiteness through changing their names and attempting to shift their accents to improve their perceived employability.

‘Do I need to have more White friends?’: proximity to Whiteness through social connections

Webb (2015) argues that migrant job seekers are often reliant on the help of ‘trustworthy local referees’ who provide endorsement of the job seeker's acceptability and suitability during the selection process. Several participants highlighted that building social connections with White people was seen as an enabler of employment success. This operates as a form of coloniality of power – proximity to the dominant holder of power (i.e. Whiteness) enables employment openings and opportunities that were otherwise not available. Participants spoke of the value of White friends and relatives in navigating employment. Mary, for example, attributed the employment of two friends to their having White husbands. When asked how the prospective workplaces knew about these women's marital situation, Mary explains:

With the case of these two people, their [White] husbands were actually the one that make the first contact to the office… then they applied and when they went there they give background information about themselves; they’re married to so-and-so, their husband work here… things like that… And even when they came to do the interview their husband dropped them there and the husband sits there to wait for them to do the interview.

Mary points to the importance of signalling the job seeker's proximity to ‘Whiteness’ to a potential employer (Hage, 2012). The importance of Africa-born job seekers needing to demonstrate the social-cultural and racialised expectations of employers, and to illustrate their proximity to Whiteness, was a sentiment shared by others. For some, getting a job required building social connections to White people and, in doing so, shaping oneself to others’ expectations. As focus group participant Miriam described:

It's like you’re fighting the system with everything you have but… no matter how much work you put in, you will always be at this level. And now that's where the change comes in. Okay, do I need to have more White friends? Do I need to act more like a White person, [because] you do have sisters who actually think like that. That's the reality, because they want that White privilege.

Miriam recognises that she is constantly ‘fighting the system’ – with the system representing the coloniality of employment selection processes. In a system in which it does not matter how much Africa-born job seekers do, they will always be found as lacking in ways which see them as fit only for particular forms of employment. And yet the agency of the job seekers sees them continuing to attempt to change themselves, to make themselves more palatable to the Whiteness of the system which they are reliant on for employment. There are two key components to the quote above from Miriam that illustrate the perceived need to position oneself as proximal to Whiteness. First, is the question of ‘do I need to have more White friends?’ which emphasises the perceived value of White friends or relatives in navigating White spaces described above. The second is the question of ‘Do I need to act more like a White person?’. This aspect will be explored further in the following sub-section. While some participants rallied against the expectation that employment success comes from having ‘more White friends’, others were more circumspect about the need to build bridges and understanding between Africa-born and (White) Australians. As Hakim says:

… it doesn’t hurt to try to understand Australians. You are in Australia after all. So I think with most people they feel that distance because it's like, oh you don’t understand me and I don’t understand you but… if you both make that effort then […] that's pretty helpful.

This suggests the significance of social context to job-seeking experiences and how (racialised) social hierarchies are embedded in this experience, a finding that is consistent with other studies that have explored migrant entry into Australian workplaces (Almeida et al., 2015; Hebbani and Colic-Peisker, 2012; Kosny et al., 2017). The coloniality of power is operating here through participants identifying howproximity to Whiteness through friendship or relations might enable shifts in their social location that would better position them for employment seeking success.

‘It's your job to try and fit into our system’: bending to Whiteness

The previous sections point to the challenges faced by Africa-born job seekers: to bend into whatever form they think may help them through the recruitment and selection process by reversing the ‘burden' of their Blackness. As Miriam asks above ‘Do I need to act more like a White person?’ Some participants described feeling as if they needed to change the ways in which they acted or behaved to bend towards what might be described as White ways of being, again demonstrating the coloniality of being. Dei (2018) describes this as proximity to Whiteness, referring not just to how one looks, ‘but also how we [Black people] seek to present ourselves and bodies, including the embodiment of particular ideals, core values, and ethics privileged by the dominant society’ (p. 130). Adau, a female participant, explained that in a job interview:

… to build that connection I feel like you have to change yourself in a sense. You have to change how you are and how you behave, how you speak, to conform to that group of people, to build that connection, to get that job. It's a whole process.

Adau, and many of the other participants were aware of the conscious decisions and actions they needed to make to position themselves closer to Whiteness thereby making themselves more relatable to the White people on employment panels. Maldonado-Torres (2007: 14) speaks strongly of this, describing that ‘the modality of existence in the hell of coloniality is that of self-erasure: blackness must disappear or at least be covered-over by whiteness’. Hakim, a male participant also recognised this bending to Whiteness, or erasure of Blackness covered-over by Whiteness, which he referred to as fitting into the system.

I think with Africans I think only one side has to make more effort. “Hey you’re in Australia, it's your job to try to fit into our system.”

Hakim suggested that it was up to the Africa-born job seekers to do the bending (to Whiteness) with little reciprocity of other employees or employers to learn about African ways of being. This was further supported by Michael, another male participant who argued that ‘employers aren’t aware of what Africans can bring to the table’. In seeking employees who can perform the values of Whiteness that are already present in workplaces, employers are overlooking opportunities to learn from and include other ways of knowing and being.

Conclusion: the coloniality of employment selection processes

The findings from our focus groups illustrate a disconnect between lived experiences of Black Africa-born job seekers and the classic account of employee job search and employer recruitment and selection, in which well-qualified, determined and hard-working job seekers with adequate human capital who make reasonable efforts and use their social networks would find suitable employment over time. The evidence from the focus groups suggests a more complicated process of finding employment and different employer expectations during the recruitment and selection process. A job seeker's human capital is not seen by recruiters in absence of racialized markers attached to them such as name, accent and skin colour. From the perspective of the focus group participants, Blackness (and its proxies – country of birth, name and accent) is as important – perhaps more important – than qualifications and experience in the hiring process. In fact, qualifications, regardless of where they are acquired, are readily dismissed when that knowledge is held by Black bodies.

Our study has illuminated the persistent influence of coloniality on the employment seeking experiences of Africa-born migrants in Australia, particularly in the context of selection processes. By examining the intersection of coloniality of power, knowledge and being, we have shown how these migrants are systematically marginalised in the labour market, despite their skills and qualifications. The concepts of coloniality of power, knowledge and being provide crucial tools to interrogate divisions of labour and the ways in which racial, gender, sexual, epistemic and linguistic hierarchies play out in recruitment processes (Grosfoguel, 2013; de Sousa Santos, 2018). Examining employment selection processes through a lens of coloniality enables a centring of the ways in which race, empire and colonialism continue to shape these processes. While in our examples coloniality appears to be upheld by individuals making decisions within institutions, we are reminded that ‘in order to live in society, we must produce the society in which we live’ (Wynter, 2003: 273). This re/production is undertaken unconsciously which allows us to ‘repress the recognition of our collective production of our modes of social reality’ (Wynter, 2003: 273). What we see, therefore, in the experiences of Black Africa-born job seekers, is the ways in which those making recruitment and selection decisions re/produce a coloniality of employment selection processes. The normalisation of the socially constructed ways in which people are categorised as who is or is not human (i.e. the damnés) have become an ‘objective set of facts’ (Wynter, 2003: 271) influencing individual and collective behaviours in employment selection processes. A theory of the coloniality of employment selection processes enables an interrogation of the ‘operation of social power…that has allowed unequal appropriations of knowledge, and marginalization of other knowledge formations’ (Connell, 2016) that make some people more employable than others.

Participants consistently expressed frustrations with the barriers they faced in accessing the labour market, barriers that were deeply intertwined with racialized perceptions of Blackness. Despite holding substantial qualifications, often obtained within Australia, these individuals found their knowledge and skills dismissed, not because of the content of their education but because of the bodies that held that knowledge. This dismissal reflects the coloniality of knowledge, where Black bodies are seen as inherently lacking in legitimate knowledge, regardless of their academic or professional achievements.

Furthermore, our study reveals how the coloniality of being shapes the experiences of Black job seekers, who are often seen as ‘out of place’ in predominantly White spaces. This perception leads to their exclusion from certain roles and reinforces the need for them to ‘bend to Whiteness’ – whether by altering their names, accents, or behaviours – to increase their chances of employment. The coloniality of power is also evident in the reliance on social connections with White individuals as a means of gaining employment, further emphasising the marginalisation of Africa-born migrants within the Australian labour market.

Our findings challenge the assumption that recruitment and selection are purely rational and technical processes, revealing instead how they are imbued with subjective judgements rooted in hegemonic White norms. The experiences of the focus group participants illustrate the ways in which social power operates. Currently, in recruitment and selection processes, the burden to overcome the perceived deficits associated with Blackness in Australia rests solely on Africa-born applicants who endeavour to adjust, compensate through bending to Whiteness, acquiring more qualifications and revising their expectations downwards. The findings reflect how the employment seeking experiences of participants are steeped in coloniality. The participants’ experiences demonstrate how Black Africa-born job seekers are positioned at the intersection of coloniality of knowledge, power and being which results as them being viewed as the damnés – an embodied subject who is not worthy of employment, or worthy only of unskilled roles below their levels of qualification.

Questions remain about how ‘Black people in the room’ are recognised by employment gatekeepers. It is not enough that Africa-born job seekers attempt to bend to Whiteness by changing their names or signalling proximity and social power by acquiring ‘more White friends’. There is much more that could be done to shift employment selection processes to recognise Blackness or Africans as social categories that mask a much more diverse group of knowledge, skills and experience-holders. To do this would require working towards decolonising employment-seeking processes. A crucial aspect of decolonisation involves envisioning a world where no single perspective holds dominance. Decolonial activists and scholars refer to this concept as the pluriverse, a world in which various ways of being, knowing and doing are valued, with no singular way as dominant (Reiter, 2018). The challenge is to develop employment selection processes that are not colonised and dominated by Whiteness.

This study underscores the necessity of incorporating a coloniality-cognizant perspective in management and organisational studies to better understand and address the structural inequities faced by racialized groups in settler colonial societies like Australia. Addressing these inequities requires more than just policy changes; it demands a fundamental shift in how organisations understand and engage with coloniality in their practices. Our preposition is that tinkering around the sides of structures that are embedded within global upholding of coloniality/modernity through diversity and inclusion initiatives will not solve the embedded coloniality of employment selection processes. More profound shifts are necessary and will require further research. The difficulty of addressing the barriers erected by coloniality should not be an excuse to ignore these barriers. A recognition of coloniality needs to be at the forefront of discussions about labour market integration and overcoming labour market divisions. Otherwise, responsibility will continue to be deflected onto job seekers themselves for their imagined deficiencies – when the real and pressing problem is the undercurrent of power that flows through the world of work.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Ethical approval

Ethics approval was granted by the University of South Australia Human Research Ethics Committee for project 202061.

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the University of South Australia (Research Themes Investment Scheme).

ORCID iDs

Melanie Baak

Michelle Baddeley

James Lejukole

Louise Olliff

Gerrit JM Treuren

Notes

Biographical notes

Melanie Baak is a senior lecturer in UniSA Education Futures and the co-convenor of the Migration and Refugee Research Network (MARRNet). She is a member of the Centre in Research for Educational and Social Inclusion (CRESI). Her research and teaching interests broadly cover areas of equity and inclusion, particularly in schools, with a focus on refugee resettlement and racialisation.

Michelle Baddeley is a professor in Economics at the University of Technology Business School and an adjunct professor with the UniSA Business School. She is a behavioural economist and her current research focuses on socio-economic decision making, under-represented groups’ job search and employment, and behavioural macro-economic policy.

James Lino Lejukole was a research assistant at the University of South Australia in 2019–2020. He has a doctorate in Anthropology from the University of Adelaide. His research interests include: experiences of war and forced migration, discourses of identity and sense of place among diasporas, the impact of ageing on family and society, and unemployment.

Everine Munyonge worked as a research assistant at the University of South Australia in 2019. Eve currently works as a community development officer at the Survivors of Torture and Trauma Assistance and Rehabilitation Service (STTARS) with migrants with refugee or refugee-like experiences. Everine has refugee lived experience and is well connected within the community through volunteering. She completed her Bachelors in Psychological Science (Cognitive Neuroscience) at the University of South Australia and the Masters in Health and International Development at Flinders University.

Louise Olliff works as a senior policy advisor for the Refugee Council of Australia and as a sessional academic. She was employed as a casual researcher for the University of South Australia in 2020. She is an adjunct fellow in the School of Social Sciences (Humanitarian and Development Research Initiative) at Western Sydney University.

Ibrahim Saidi was a research assistant at the University of South Australia from 2019 to 2020. He is an R/Shiny developer and blogger, with a passion for creating data science tools. His academic achievements include a Bachelor's degree in Biomedical Science and a Master's degree in Biotechnology from the University of Adelaide. He is currently a writer for Towards Data Science – a publication dedicated to sharing concepts, ideas and code.

Gerrit JM (Gerry) Treuren teaches in the UniSA Business School and researches migrant and refugee job search, volunteer motivations, employee social support and turnover and retention.

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