employment. Those with ethnic names and ethnic qualifications fare the worse, even when their CVs are comparatively the same as Pākehā applications (Wilson et al., 2005). The researchers created CVs for “overqualified” Asian and Pākehā job applicants in three studies. They then gave them to Human Resource Management students (practicing managers and undergraduates) to rate for suitability and shortlist the best three. The first study showed that Pākehā applicants were rated as more suitable than Indians, who were rated as slightly more suitable than Chinese applicants. Furthermore, those who had ethnic sounding names (as opposed to anglicised Asian names) were rated even worse. Of those shortlisted, 63.5% were Pākehā and the remainder were evenly split between the Indian and Chinese applicants. The second study aimed to test the hypothesis that Asian migrants are disadvantaged in seeking employment because their Asian qualifications are unknown to the majority of employers. Other research has shown that employers indeed prefer applicants to have NZ qualifications (Butcher, Spoonley & Trlin, 2006; Henderson, 2003), but the results of this study show that this explains only part of the picture. Applicants this time were Pākehā, local Chinese (with New Zealand qualifications), Chinese migrants (with Chinese qualifications) and UK/Canadian migrants (with UK/Canadian qualifications) and their CVs were given to participants to rate and shortlist. Pākehā applicants were again rated the highest and Asian migrants the lowest. In line with the results from the first study, Pākehā were shortlisted nearly 60% of the time. The difference was that no Chinese migrants were shortlisted, and surprisingly the UK/Canadian migrants were shortlisted more often than the local Chinese applicants. The fact that no Chinese migrants were shortlisted, whereas some local Chinese applicants were, partially supported the hypothesis that Asian migrants are at a disadvantage due to their foreign and unknown qualifications. However, the result that local Chinese were shortlisted less often than UK/Canadian qualifications suggests that it is more than just their qualifications that are putting Asians at a disadvantage in seeking employment. The third study in the series aimed to test whether the first two studies were underrepresenting the inequities faced by Asians applying for jobs. They argued that since the pools of CVs given to the participants in the previous studies were evenly split between applicant ethnicity, Asians were being overrepresented in terms of the wider New Zealand population. They decided to vary the number of (local) Chinese applicants that they included in a pool of ten (otherwise Pākehā) applications. In all cases, Chinese applications were shortlisted significantly less often than if they had been chosen at random. Almost unbelievably, when eight Chinese applications were provided in a pool of 10, two of the participants chose to only shortlist the Pākehā CVs and declined to shortlist a third (Chinese) applicant (Wilson et al., 2005). Chinese candidate selection by pool representation Number of Applicants Expected Selection (%) Candidates Selected - Actual (%) 2 20 4.44 4 40 13.3 6 60 33.33 8 80 37.8 Source: Wilson et al., 2005 13