The Zurich cantonal parliament (Kantonsrat) has voted to shelve a proposal that would have required anonymous job applications within the cantonal administration, with the majority arguing existing recruitment practices are already sufficiently fair.
The push for anonymised applications is grounded in research from ETH Zurich’s KOF Swiss Economic Institute, published in the journal Nature, showing that people of foreign origin face measurably worse odds in the Swiss job market even when their qualifications match those of Swiss competitors. The study found candidates with foreign backgrounds receive 6.5% fewer interview invitations despite equivalent profiles, with the disadvantage growing sharper for candidates from the Balkans, Africa or Asia — who face up to 19% lower odds of being invited to interview.
A coalition of the Green Liberal Party (GLP), Social Democrats (SP) and Greens had pushed for job applications to be processed without names, photos, nationality, marital status, gender or age visible to hiring managers, at least until after invitations to a first interview had been sent. The goal was to reduce hiring discrimination and improve equal opportunity. The push traces back to an original 2020 motion, which the Kantonsrat referred for government review in 2023 by a vote of 111 to 55.
Judith Anna Stofer of the Alternative List (AL) argued the case for the reform: “Nobody is immune to unconscious bias,” she said, adding that such bias urgently needs to be minimised.
Michael Siegenthaler, a co-author of the KOF study, told the local media, “The greater the cultural distance of a foreign group relative to the Swiss, the worse their chances in the labour market.”
He added that reducing discrimination would also carry economic benefits by allowing better use of the available labour pool.
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Cross-Party Support, But Rejected In Parliament?
The idea has found some traction beyond the political left. FDP city parliamentarian Përparim Avdili submitted a similar postulate in the Zurich municipal council.
Within the Kantonsrat, however, centre-right and right-wing parties argued the canton already does enough to prevent discrimination and that fully anonymised applications were unnecessary. FDP representative Angie Romero argued that absolute anonymity could never truly be guaranteed, since inferences can always be drawn from application documents. Romero said, “Anonymity ends at the latest at the interview stage.”
SVP representative Susanne Brunner argued that anonymization would incur costs disproportionate to its benefits and could work against diversity efforts, asking how a department could aim to hire more women if it did not know which applicants were women. She said the canton already recruits fairly today, pointing to a government report she said convincingly demonstrated this.
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Bias Towards Asian African Job Seekers In Zurich: Government’s Response
The cantonal government (Regierungsrat) prepared its report after the Kantonsrat referred the postulate in 2023. It stated the canton already takes extensive measures to prevent discrimination: applications are reviewed by HR professionals under a four-eyes principle, and managers receive diversity training. Most existing application tools already omit nationality and photos, and the new “Aurora” recruitment tool being rolled out will also drop explicit questions about gender and date of birth — details independently confirmed by both Swissinfo and the canton’s own Aurora project documentation.
However, full anonymisation would require redacting CVs, references and diplomas, requiring costly new IT tools.
The government argued that fostering a broader culture of non-discrimination matters more than partial technical anonymization.
“Equal opportunity is not achieved through partial anonymisation of application steps, but through creating a discrimination-free culture among those involved in the hiring process.”
The University of St. Gallen’s Competence Centre for Diversity & Inclusion reached a similar conclusion, finding anonymous application processes are not a guarantee against discrimination, with some studies showing minorities do not always benefit from anonymised procedures.
