The recent economic crisis has affected different sectors, and the transformations of work in western cities drive the productive systems to adapt to the demand of flexibility in a more and more competitive market. Thereby ethnic distinctions, which seem to respond to local needs of work organisations, arise from recruitment and selection practices in the French labour market, despite the dominant republican norm of equal opportunity in France. From the perspective of employers, belonging to an ethnic community seems to carry sense and information about a job searcher's productivity, flexibility or expertise. Domestic labour is emblematic of the adjustments between the global dimension of workforce circulation and the local sphere of matching and selection practices. Traditionally associated with feminine work, domestic labour concerns particularly the occupational integration of immigrant women. For most of them, it is often the only possibility of employment and, occasionally, an opportunity to develop their own career or, more rarely, to move to another sector. In France, domestic workers are often placed by employment services to gain access to their employers. Thereby, three types of institutional gatekeepers are involved: (a) Public agents, particularly the national job agency; (b) domestic service providers (both associations and enterprises), and (c) professional integration agents (enterprises and associations for social integration through employment). This paper analysis the role these gatekeepers play in ethnicizing job placements. Referring to the French economy of conventions and to five interview-based case studies in Marseille, the paper analyses the forms of coordination the three above gatekeepers establish with other labour market actors (institutions, employing families, and the job seekers themselves) in order to match supply and demand, and in particular cases, to facilitate professional integration of disadvantaged job seekers. We ask how different organisational forms of job placement, that is the different conventions of coordination, which institutional gatekeepers rely on, impact on their definition and use of ethnic categories to match job offer and job applicants. Hence, we especially look at organisational mechanisms bonding ethnic group belonging to job descriptions subject to different organisational forms of coordination. The chosen conceptual approach enables us to highlight both the societal context of reference – such as national norms, local requirements and organisational rules – and the categories of action, which result from gatekeepers' practices, in the process of hiring. The paper outlines the processes and priorities, which orientate their choices, as well as the difficulties they face to adopt pure principles of decision-making as they usually have to negotiate, combine and consolidate different logics of coordination to find a compromise between them. As a result of our case studies, we hypothesize that, for ethnic categories to become useful and operational in job placement, particular forms of institutional coordination are required. For example, the conventions of both the “market world” and the trust-based “domestic world” play an essential role in defining the modalities of negotiation between the family, the provider and the worker. It is the latter world where ethnicity carries sense and becomes an operative indicator of competence. In contrast, the cooperation between the public employment system and professional integration agents is strongly based on conventions stemming from the “industrial world” and the “civic world” and thus adopts ethic rather than ethnic principles of coordination. Hence, the prevention of ethnic categories in job placement relies on the implementation of specific forms and compromises of organisational coordination.