Ray Fang, an assistant professor in the Department of Management, co-authored “Class advantage in the white-collar labor market: An investigation of social class background, job search strategies, and job search success” that was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology.
The authors propose that individuals from upper-class backgrounds are more effective at job searching than their working-class counterparts in the white-collar labor market. This is partly because upper-class individuals adopt different job search strategies.
“As a first-generation student with working-class parents, I’ve noticed subtle and not-so-subtle differences between my job search experiences and those of my middle-to-upper class peers, and I often wondered if these differences were part of a broader phenomenon that has gone under-explored,” Fang said.
Some job seekers seem to be more successful, not only because they have parents that can pay for an elite education or introduce them to an aspirational employer, but also because they approach their job search with more clarity and direction: what job they want, how they should search for a job and which organizations to work for, among other considerations.
Fang wrote the paper with Alan Saks, a professor of organizational behavior and human resource management at the University of Toronto Scarborough.