Employers are discriminating against jobseekers from ethnic minority backgrounds at the interview stage, according to a study by the Department for Work and Pensions and Kings College, London.

The study revealed a number of interview practices were found to disadvantage ethnic minority candidates, including assessing work experience and language skills, foreign work experience was frequently ignored.

Celia Roberts, senior research fellow at the Department of Education & Professional Studies and the Centre for Language, Discourse and Communication at KCL, said:

"You are what you talk in the job interview," she said, "but job interview English is different from the day-to-day communications you need, for example, for a manual job in a factory or doing delivery work."

"Candidates, many of them highly qualified in the countries where they grew up, have the work skills for the job, but not the job interview English," she said.