Cultural and Human Capital Signals in Hiring-A Factorial Survey Experiment Across Contexts

When evaluating candidates, hiring agents may draw on signals of human as well as cultural capital. While these processes have been considered separately, an open question is how the two types of signals interact. As signals of social class, cultural capital signals relate to human capital as they evoke stereotypes about competence, polish, and discipline, and can indicate different patterns of social mobility in combination with human capital signals. These interdependencies may be important in employee gatekeeping, and therefore in the reproduction of labour market inequalities. In this paper, we address the question of how hiring agents evaluate cultural capital signals in light of different human capital signals. We draw on a factorial survey experiment to analyse hiring agents' evaluations of different cultural capital signals (combining signals of class backgrounds and class practices) in relation to human capital indicators (the level and specificity of education, training participation, and work experience) across contexts. These contexts include two countries, Germany and England, two sectors, Software Development and Human Resource Management, and two career stages, the early and late career. The results show that the value of highbrow cultural capital signals depends on the context, as well as on human capital signals. In Software Development and HRM as the professional fields that we studied, hiring agents often did not give value to cultural capital signals. This was especially the case in England. In Germany, positive evaluations of cultural capital signals mostly followed a multiplication effect: such signals were only valued when higher human capital signals were also indicated. We found this pattern most clearly in Germany, particularly for late-career candidates. This multiplication effect underlines the importance of looking at combinations of cultural and human capital signals for understanding how inequalities are generated in gatekeeping processes.