Migrants in the Russian Labor Market: An Assessment of Starting Opportunities

Abstract

The article presents the results of a study devoted to the analysis of foreign citizens’ access to the labor market in Russia. The empirical basis of the study was a series of experiments conducted by the authors of the article in November 2020. Through experiments, we studied the effect of nationality of potential employees on the chance of receiving an invitation from an employer for an interview. The experiments were carried out using the most popular job search and recruiting site HeadHunter. The results obtained allowed us to conclude that the access of migrants from different countries to the Russian labor market is not the same. The most preferable for employers are migrants from Ukraine and Belarus, and the access of other migrants is more or less limited. The outsiders are citizens of Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan. We also analyzed the strategies of employers when choosing employees with different citizenships, conditions of employment for vacancies for migrants and non-migrants.