Having the right qualifications, experience and references should be all that matters when you go for a job interview. Sometimes though, an applicant by any other name, is not as sweet.

According to Australian-born Miroslaw Mirski, when it comes to securing a job, the name of the game is to sound like an Englishman.

After changing his first name to John, he found that his surname was still being scrutinised. "People are still questioning my racial origin,” Miroslaw said, and he feels that this is leading to discrimination.

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Unemployed for 22 monthsm the qualified engineer with Polish heritage is convinced Aussie employers prefer Anglo-Saxon sounding candidates, and Professor Andrew Leigh agrees.

“The most call-backs come for Anglo-Australians. The fewest come from Chinese job seekers,” Professor Leigh said.

Professor Leigh and researchers from the Australian National University put employers to the test, sending out 4,000 identical resumes to measure reactions to different ethnic names.

They discovered that names were more important than the details and experience listed by the so-called candidates, finding Anglo-Saxons were called back 35 per cent of the time, followed by Italians, the Indigenous, then the Middle Eastern, and finally Chinese job hunters.

“They're all fake IDs, so we can be sure when we see differences in call-back rates between Ahmed Harrari and John Smith, that’s actually racism rather than anything else,” explained Professor Leigh.

After applying unsuccessfully for more then 1,000 jobs, Sudanese jobseeker Agnok Lueth actually resorted to using the alias Daniel McClean. Of the six fake name applications submitted, he received five callbacks.

“We ask ourselves, why is it that we are not being accepted?” said Saturnino Onyala, Secretary General of Australia's Sudanese Community Association.

“Now we're being trained and being graduated here in Australia, and yet we find that we can't get a job. We find it extremely difficult to understand this,” he said.

“The aim is to get the best person for the job, and the best person doesn't come from a particular background, and is not a particular gender. It's the person that is most qualified and most able to do the job,” said CEO of the Victorian Employer's Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Mark Stone.

Mark believes employment racism is almost non-existent. “We've got 25 per cent of Australians who were not born here in Australia, and 40 per cent speak a language other than English at home. So with employment running at almost zero, we've already got a very strong diversity across our employment population,” he added.

Yet Taiwanese-born Ya-Hui Yang spent more than 10 years looking for work in Australia, according to her husband Dirk Biddle. “When they see her name on the resume, they see an Asian name. They think that perhaps she doesn’t understand, and maybe not read further into her resume,” Dirk said.

And despite meeting Australian standards, experienced anesthetist Moataz Shagi applied for more than 85 healthcare positions with no luck.

“Everyone talks about shortage in the medical workforce, but we are sitting here, we are ready for work, and no one gave us the opportunity,” he said.