French Firm Tests Colorblind Hiring

'Anonymous Résumés' Fuel Debate

PARIS -- When the prime minister of France wanted a powerful, unimpeachable voice to recommend how to end job discrimination in the country, he turned to Claude Bebear, an outspoken takeover artist who had built a small regional insurance firm into the world's biggest.

Bebear, who saw racial discrimination as one of France's most deeply rooted and insidious problems, did not disappoint. In a report 14 months ago, he brought a largely hidden topic into full public view. Bebear laid out a series of proposed remedies, including a colorblind recruiting tool known as the "anonymous résumé."

Typically, in France, "they throw away the résumés of people who are from bad parts of town which are supposed to have Arabs or blacks," Bebear, 70, said in an interview. "When you have somebody whose name is Mohammed and he lives in St. Denis," a low-income community outside Paris, "you say, 'I won't bother with that one,' and so they don't even answer them."

The solution, Bebear said, is to strip résumés of anything that could tip off recruiters to a person's racial, ethnic and national background or other information that could be used to discriminate -- name, age, sex, even residential postal code. "Then the man who is in charge of recruitment will look at that and say, 'Oh, that résumé is a very good one. Send me that guy,' and in the folder he has in front of him is an old black woman or a handicapped person."

Today, Bebear has made his company, AXA -- a 112,000-employee behemoth that receives 40,000 résumés a year in France alone -- a testing ground for anonymous résumés. The results from the first year are not yet in, but after minority youths rioted across France last fall, the concept is attracting growing support and helping to fuel a legislative debate.

Most of the youths who took part in the violence were from black and Muslim immigrant families that have lived in France for more than a generation but have never fully integrated into French society. Lack of decent-paying jobs was one of their main grievances.

French President Jacques Chirac recently endorsed the use of anonymous résumés, and other politicians, big businesses and anti-discrimination groups are following suit. The powerful French bureaucracy, however, has been slow to embrace the idea, preferring to study it and weigh potential legal problems. Some people blame the government's tepid enthusiasm on a French mind-set that has hindered public discussion of the country's discrimination problem for decades.

"The idea of diversity is really only a year old here -- we were so sure of ourselves in terms of equity and equality that we never recognized that we had a racial problem in France, because a man was a man and nothing else," said Laurence Mehaignerie, an adviser to France's minister of equal opportunities. "It had to be something very violent, like these recent events, before we recognized that discrimination was at a very high level, and we started to realize there was a racial problem."

Among whites and minorities interviewed here, almost everyone agreed that there was racial prejudice in France. Some whites expressed concern that anonymous résumés would lead to minority quotas or affirmative action-style programs that could discriminate against them.

Serge Simon, a 21-year-old French youth whose parents are Haitian, said he liked the idea. "I think that with an anonymous résumé, a person will be hired for what they are -- for their qualifications and not for the color of their skin," he said.

But Simon, a salesclerk at a clothing store in Place de Clichy, a working-class neighborhood in northern Paris, said he was skeptical about whether the idea would prove effective because, in the end, the French government couldn't mandate change. "The bosses have to change their behaviors and ideas," he said.

Hassen Akremi, a Tunisian with a master's degree in international public law, said he had studied and worked legally in France for 12 years -- but only in menial jobs. "Racism is cultural," he complained. "It is in the conscience of the French mentality." Simple programs such as anonymous résumés will not erase it, he predicted.