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the importance of migrant status on employment and career
outcomes. Although the effect of human capital (i.e. formal
education) on migrants’ employment and career attainment
has been shown to be positive, especially if the education
and work experience is obtained locally (Nordin and Rooth,
2007), differences in human capital do not entirely explain the
employment differential between native and migrant workers.
Researchers have noted the roles of different factors in the
selection of migrants, including local language (e.g. Cooke et
al., 2013, Guerrero and Rothstein, 2012), social capital (e.g.
Sarpong and Maclean, 2019, Shirmohammadi et al., 2019),
and cultural capital—referring to the local vocational norms,
behaviors, and unwritten laws of work culture and host coun-
tries’ value systems (e.g. Al Ariss and Syed, 2011, Hakak et al.,
2010, Lu et al., 2016). The essence of most selection systems
is comparing shortlisted candidates based on a set of criteria.
Often, more than one candidate is assessed as appointable,
and when none of the candidates exceeds the others by a
great margin, the selection decision tends to be based on how
acceptable the candidate seems to be, particularly with res-
pect to the workplace or national culture (Farashah and Blom-
quist, 2020, Noon, 2012). This criteria relates to the concept
of cultural capital (referring to the notion of embodied cultural
capital in Bourdieu’s theory of practice (2008)) that is widely
used in migration studies (Erel, 2010).
Another school of HRM uses competency models as
the foundation for selection, appraisal, and development of
employees. Competency-based HRM focuses on individuals’
behavioral characteristics that relate to quality performance
instead of characteristics such as human capital. Because
competency-based HRM is devoted to tangible performance,
it is considered an effective way to address the challenge of
diversity.
Therefore, expanding career capital theory (DeFillippi
and Arthur, 1994) and Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital
(Bourdieu, 2008) in the context of migrant worker selection

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