Browsing by Subject "ideaalityöntekijä"

Despite many attempts to promote gender equality, the working life is still gendered. Although much research has been done on gender equality, the impact of outsourced recruitment on gender equality needs to be further explored in the Finnish context. Previous research on the impact of recruiters on gender equality shows that recruiters' work and assessment of job applicants is influenced by many unconscious assumptions. Recruitment can be seen as a process that maintains inequality with the recruiter acting as a gatekeeper to the working life. The concept of the ideal worker has also been widely studied as a phenomenon where the ideal worker is something that no job seeker can achieve. This thesis examines equality as part of recruiters’ work and the recruiter as the producer of the concept of ideal worker. The research data was collected from interviews with professionals of recruitment conducted during the summer and autumn of 2023. A total of three recruiters from three different outsourced recruitment companies participated in the interviews. The interviews were conducted as semi-structured qualitative interviews. Critical discourse analysis was used to analyze the interview data. The critical discursive approach allows for the examination of potential structures of power emerging from the data. Three different discourses emerged from the interviews with recruiters: the discourse of responsibility, the discourse of gender neutrality and the discourse of the ideal worker. Recruiters' discourses conveyed a mixed picture of who is responsible for promoting gender equality in recruitment. In the interviews, the importance of gender in the recruitment process was downplayed. However, the ideal worker was created through strong contrasts between different genders and job positions. In the light of this thesis, the recruiter is seen as a gatekeeper of gender equality as is also stated in previous research. This thesis creates an image of recruiters as strong actors in gender equality who have the power to influence people's work situation but at the same time do not acknowledge the importance of gender in the recruitment process. Further research is needed on the competence of recruiters' regarding equality and on the impact of outsourced recruitment on gender equality in recruitment