Supervisors: Christa Thomsen & Jakob Lauring
Discussants: Christiane Høvring & Pernille Smith

Abstract
A growing number of researchers are proclaiming an increasing complexity in managing diversity. The responsibility of advising and/or deciding what kind of diversity to invite into the organization and what not, foregrounds recruiters as essential gatekeepers in organizations’ quest for diversifying the workplace. Some scholars have contributed with knowledge on recruitment practices aiming at fostering diversity through for example the establishment of discrimination policies (Shen, Chanda D’Netto, and Monga, 2009), inclusive use of language in job advertisements (Hodel, Formanowicz, Sczesny, Valdrová, and von Stockhausen, 2017), and being sensitized to prejudice that foster discriminatory behavior (McKay and Avery, 2005). However, when studying the human resource (HR) literature, prior research focus especially on the discriminatory nature of recruiters’ practices suggesting that recruiters play an important role in the processes leading to workplace inequality (e.g. Cohen and Bunker, 1975; Graves and Powell, 1988; Graves and Powell, 1996; Newman and Lyon, 2009; Moore, 2015; Pyburn, Ployhart, and Kravitz, 2008; Ployhart and Holtz, 2008; Uggerslev, Fassina, and Kraichy, 2012; Hofhuis, van der Zee, and Otten, 2016; Brooks, Guidroz, and Chakrabarti, 2009; Goldberg, 2005). As such, paradoxical implications appear from some of the previous research portraying recruiters as both enablers and disablers of diversity. This underscores the substantial research gap focusing on recruiters’ role in diversity with the empirical findings that do exist remaining significantly scattered and contradictory. This is problematic because a lack of thorough empirical investigation of recruiters’ role in diversity risks portraying a fragmented picture of some of the essential gatekeepers in diversifying the workplace.

Therefore, based on ethnographic fieldwork in a multinational production company, the purpose of this PhD dissertation is to provide a micro-level, empirical account to the HR literature and Diversity literature that goes in-depth with how recruiters contribute to creating diverse workplaces and how they navigate potential challenges in relation to this. This micro-level perspective enables a further investigation of the paradoxical implications appearing from some of the previous research portraying recruiters as both enablers and disablers of diversity. It does so by bringing forth more knowledge about recruiters’ actual challenges and how – or if – they cope with and respond to these, which might tell a different story about their role in diversity thereby moving the HR and Diversity research fields significantly forward.

The presentation will focus on selected chapters from the PhD dissertation as well as a general outline of the four articles constituting the findings of the dissertation.

Everyone is welcome!