Researchers from the National Centre for pearl jewelry Social Research, commissioned by the Department for Work and Pension (DWP), sent three different applications for 987 actual vacancies between November 2008 and May 2009. Nine occupations were chosen, ranging from highly qualified positions such as accountants and IT technicians to less well-paid positions such as care workers and sales assistants.

All the job vacancies were in the private, public and voluntary sectors and were based in Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, Glasgow, Leeds, London and Manchester. The report, to be released tomorrow, concludes that there was no plausible explanation for the difference in treatment found between white British and ethnic minority applicants other than racial discrimination.

It also finds that public sector employers were less likely to biwa pearl have discriminated on the grounds of race than those in the private sector.

One reason for this discrepancy, according to the conclusion, is the use of standard application forms in the public sector which hide or disguise the ethnicity of an applicant. The research is also understood to have found that larger employers were less likely to discriminate than small employers.

Researchers have refused to release the names of the guilty employers, but it is expected that they will be contacted to let them know they had been targeted.

The report has been welcomed by senior race advisers as evidence of discrimination in the job market. Iqbal Wahhab, chair of the Ethnic Minority Advisory Group, which proposes policy changes for the government on race and employment, said: "The evidence of the DWP report is unquestionable – we live in a society where racial discrimination systematically occurs and currently goes in the main unchallenged." Wahhab, an entrepreneur, said that the employers should not be "named and shamed" but persuaded to change.

"The employers who fell foul of the DWP CV test are not bigots – they are business people. I don't suggest we slap injunctions on them and probably not even name and shame them, but instead we should help them understand that their current practices mean they are not fit to supply big customers like government departments," he said.

The findings echo the experience of akoya pearl black and Asian jobseekers contacted this weekend. James Nkwacha, 28, a physics graduate whose family are from Nigeria, said he has applied for 60 jobs this year but had only two replies. "The jobs are within my range. I am qualified for them. But for some reason I have been overlooked," he said.