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Agnieszka Nowinska, Aalborg University Business School, Aalborg, Denmark

Marte C.W. Solheim, University of Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway

More and more people nowadays decide to leave their home countries and live abroad. They move to improve their living conditions and getting a job in the new country is crucial for succeeding. Bringing their knowledge and networks, migrants constitute valuable resources for firms. It however still remains a conundrum that, although migrants' worth in the labor markets has been proved, there is also evidence of them struggling in getting into dreamt jobs abroad. The question of how migrants integrate into the workforce in the host-countries has been studied by scholars extensively in the context of discrimination and immigrant entrepreneurship. In our study, we asked the question about specific migrants' characteristics that, in comparison to locals, make them more likely to succeed and be hired at higher hierarchical levels.

We studied migrants' career trajectories in a single case study of a Danish service firm using hiring decisions over several decades. We find that migrants' human capital, in the guise of any professional experience (including experience from related industries), is not enough to help improve career prospects. Professional experience originating from the host country and the focal industry is more useful, but only for men. In the male-dominated service industry, women are heavily discriminated against and that, surprisingly,  goes for immigrant women and local women as well. We termed this phenomenon "gender- foreignness liability". We also find that even if they possess the right human capital, its value as a signal of quality directed at potential employers is not always enough. What the employer seemed to value and perceive as a signal of "loyalty" was a longer stay period in the new country.

Taken together, there are many conditions that migrants need to fulfill in order to have successful careers. Not only the right competences or skills are needed, but also a tenure in the new country helps (male) migrants building successful careers.

To read this article, please see the Journal of Global Mobility publication:

Nowinska, A. and Solheim, M.C.W. (2024), "Unpacking the influence of foreignness on employment prospects within a multinational enterprise: an examination of gender, professional experience and duration of stay", Journal of Global Mobility, Vol. 12 No. 2, pp. 288-312. https://doi.org/10.1108/JGM-08-2023-0053" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://doi.org/10.1108/JGM-08-2023-0053