Relatability as a Racialised Construct in Corporate Graduate Recruitment: Revealing a Hidden Mechanism of Labour Market Exclusion for Black African Youth in South Africa

Abstract

In corporate graduate recruitment worldwide, candidates are often assessed not only on competence but on whether they are deemed relatable. This study theorises relatability as a racialised cultural–affective filter that covertly sustains inequality. Drawing on qualitative interviews, we identify five interlinked processes of self-presentation, confidence, bias, choice, and affinity, through which whiteness operates as a normative anchor in hiring. We extend theories of social closure into aesthetic and affective domains, conceptualising relatability as a meso-level mechanism linking micro-interactional judgements to macro-level racial hierarchies. This framework offers a transferable analytic lens for understanding how cultural capital is operationalised in exclusionary ways across contexts, even in formally and supposedly deracialised systems. The findings call for demand-side reforms that reconfigure organisational norms, broaden definitions of professionalism, and reduce reliance on cultural familiarity as a proxy for merit. Relatability operates as an institutionalised mechanism through which classed and racialised dispositions are recognised and reproduced, even within racially diverse hiring structures.