11 ms·

I suspect many companies wouldn't use this as it would make affirmative hiring policies more difficult. For example, recruiters at my company curate lists of na

• kristianc 8y ago
  This comment reminds me somewhat of the Oxford and Cambridge interviewing processes. They have names and educational backgrounds to hand, and it's well known that all things being equal, tutors would always rather go for a kid from a state echool / underprivileged / non traditional background over one that went to a top public school. It's not just a matter of hitting targets - the alternative is that everyone who gets in is from a wealthy family or went to a top fee paying school. If everything is blind, you get less of an opportunity to engage in this kind of affirmative action.
  • manfredo 8y ago
    It's a double edged sword. In tech, it's been found that blind hiring processes where candidates' name, education, and past employers are obscured (a third party broadly describes the education and work experience but doesn't give any explicit names) does result in more hires from less prestigious universities and companies. But it does make the hired population more male and more white & Asian. I think triplebyte did a study.
    • taway90210 8y ago
      >> But it does make the hired population more male and more white & Asian Is that a reflection of bias or a reflection of the graduate hiring pool? If 90% of the CS graduates are male and your hiring process hires 90% male, is that bais or simply an extension of some problem upstream?
    • depressedpanda 8y ago
      How is that in any way double edged? Or am I wrong in thinking that hiring policies should strive to be as meritocratic as possible, even if that means more white/Asian men?
      • manfredo 8y ago
        Well, in the Bay Area yes. Many do think meritocratic systems are bad because they often produce results that don't reflect the broader population. Some go so far as to say that advocating a meritocratic system is an act of racism and sexism. To me at least, I don't think it's fair to make the blanket statement that meritocracy is bad. It's all a question of values, namely whether someone values equality of the process itself or equaity of the process's outcome. Different people have different values so they'll inevitably have different opinions on meritocratic systems.
  • sct202 8y ago
    It's kind of unfair to compare raw stats of kids who went to elite prep schools vs poor public schools. Like I was thinking about the amount of activities, tutors, private school my SO and I could pay for if we had a kid. And it was kind of insane to compare that versus what we grew up with, and how different our own HS resumes would have been with the same level of resources.
  • umanwizard 8y ago
    I think you should point out what "public school" means in Britain, otherwise there is a 100% chance that any Americans who aren't aware of that definition will misunderstand your comment. (In the US, the term "public school" means what you mean by "state school", afaict).
  • Sacho 8y ago
    > It's not just a matter of hitting targets - the alternative is that everyone who gets in is from a wealthy family or went to a top fee paying school. This doesn't follow. The alternative is getting whatever the ratio of <people from wealthy families>/<people from underprivileged/nontraditional backgrounds> is. So following your argument, the people from underprivileged backgrounds that meet the "all things being equal" test must be an insignificant amount.
• DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
  I'd hate to work somewhere knowing I was hired because the color of my skin and not my abilities. maybe less of an issue in non-brainy jobs, but in Tech I would feel more insecure not knowing if I got the job to fill a quota. This sounds rather disgusting to me.
  • manfredo 8y ago
    Again, I really hope it's clear that we don't deliberately hire unqualified candidate because they're considered diverse. It only affects resume reviews and phone interviews which are basically coin tosses.
    • jfk13 8y ago
      If those stages are "basically coin tosses", why do you bother with them? It'd be quicker and cheaper to toss a coin.
      • manfredo 8y ago
        To be more specific they do work to filter out candidates that unambiguously lack the required skills. But for candidates that do have the required skills it's more of a coim toss. Working through a coding question online filters out candidates that can't code or are not competent at coding. But for candidates who can code sufficiently well, it's kind of a coin toss. Maybe they just don't think of the solution in time and what not.
  • andrewl-hn 8y ago
    In the case that parent commenter described, you would be invited to the interview based on your qualifications and your color, but would be hired based on your demonstrated abilities during the interviews.
    • manfredo 8y ago
      I respect both sides to of this debate. If a candidate had a 2nd attempt at passing the phone interview (which we provide at higher rates to diverse candidates) then it is somewhat fair to say the candidate would not have been hired if they weren't diverse. But phone screens are very low signal. It filters out people that are not competent coders, but beyond that it's basically a count toss. We also provide 2nd phone interviews to people that have referrals. So you could basically frame this as saying we treat diverse candidates as though someone referred them to the company. Again, I can empathize with why people think this is unfair and maybe paternalistic. I also respect those who see it as a prudent measure to be inclusive. I'm Cuban myself, but I come from a very wealthy family and attended a premiere computer science university. I'm also pretty much visibly White (btw many Cubans do consider themselves White) I do sometimes feel awkward checking the "Hispanic or Latino". If a company gave me additional opportunity on the basis of my heritage the I don't think it's leveling any playing field. If anything, it's giving someone who's already coming from a position of advantage with an even bigger advantage.
• gburt 8y ago
  > Recruiters at my company aren't explicitly told to hit certain quotas, but they are given larger bonuses for diverse hires and they do have targets for certain percentages of diverse candidate. I'm definitely not a lawyer and I live nowhere near the Bay Area, but by my reading of most of these laws, this is illegal. I realize we often interpret these issues differently depending on who they effect, but this sounds like an open-and-shut case of discrimination to me.
  • tha_nose 8y ago
    It most definitely is not illegal. Many colleges have race and gender based quota systems. Governments have race and gender quota systems. Many federal, state and local governments set aside X percentage of their contracts solely for minority or female owned businesses. Whether this is right or wrong is another debate. But race, gender or "diversity" hiring or recruiting certainly isn't illegal. It happens all the time.
    • dragonwriter 8y ago
      > It most definitely is not illegal. Yes it is. > Many colleges have race and gender based quota systems. Quota systems have been repeatedly struck down in college admissions as illegal. > Governments have race and gender quota systems. Quota systems for public education (including higher education) and employment have also repeatedly been ruled illegal.
      • manfredo 8y ago
        The distinction between quotas and "outcome based goals" is kind of hazy. To be clear, recruiters aren't required to hit certain targets. Leadership does tell recruiters that they're aiming for a a certain targets but as far as I know recruiters don't receive any penalty if they fall below that target.
        • CyberDildonics 8y ago
          Even telling recruiters to hire a certain demographic is discrimination. The parent post said that recruiters had large bonuses for certain demographics.
• jfk13 8y ago
  > For example, recruiters at my company curate lists of names that are majority female, black, or Hispanic (pulled from the census bureau) in order to try and determine which candidates are diverse. (Implied: in order to favour them at some point in the process.) Is that even legal? So as an individual with a traditional Western European male name, I would be at a relative disadvantage if I applied to your company. Hmm.
  • manfredo 8y ago
    Yup. Pro tip, give your kid a name like "Rafael". I trust our company's lawyers as to whether or not this is legal. Race does not directly affect hiring decisions. It only affects resume review and phone screen. So it does affect the population that get to the on-site. But functionally this doesn't seem much different than say, recruiting at an HBCU.
    • eli 8y ago
      Deciding where to locate a recruiting event is different than deciding which applicants to move to the next stage.
      • manfredo 8y ago
        One could say that deciding where to hold recruiting events dictates which people go from the "zeroth stage" of not being in the application pool at all to th first stage of resume review.
        • eli 8y ago
          I don't think holding recruiting events in a place where you ONLY expect to find one kind of person is a good idea for a lot of reasons. But I think there's a different moral and legal obligation as an employer to people who have applied to a job versus those who haven't. Big difference between having a table at a HBCU recruiting event versus sorting resumes based on what race you think the applicant is.
  • 8y ago
• mpweiher 8y ago
  > which candidates are diverse Apart from the legality aspects: a single person cannot be "diverse". You can have a diverse group, but not a diverse person. Unless they're schizophrenic, maybe.
• nostromo 8y ago
  Just based on a plain reading of the Civil Rights Act of 64, I don't see how this practice is considered legal. > It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer 2) to limit, segregate, or classify his employees in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employment agency to fail or refuse to refer for employment, or otherwise to discriminate against, any individual because of his race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, or to classify or refer for employment any individual on the basis of his race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. It's interesting how very clear language, like the above, can be eroded away over the years by a hundred well-meaning court decisions.
  • claudiawerner 8y ago
    The "very clear language" you speak of actually created gaps in the law which ostensibly still abided by the letter. For instance, the SEP article on affirmative action[0] notes that employers, faced with the new act, would remove the pipeline which funneled black people into maintenance jobs but add a requirement such that anyone over a certain number of years at the company would not be allowed to transfer to another department. While seeming fair in according to 'race, color, religion, sex or national origin' its intent and effect was to trap the older black workers (who were of course all hired into maintenance divisions) in their current job and stop them from moving up. >Thus, preferential affirmative action in the workplace served the same rationale as the non-preferential sort. Its purpose was not to compensate for past wrongs, offset unfair advantage, appropriately reward the deserving, or yield a variety of social goods; its purpose was to change institutions so they could comply with the nondiscrimination mandate of the Civil Rights Act. In fact, some philosophers have argued that merely receiving the fruits produced by injustice is enough to make one personally liable to compensate a victim for the injustice. [0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/affirmative-action/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/affirmative-action/
    • manfredo 8y ago
      There's a lot of holes in this logic. For one Asians are hit hardest by affirmative action, but we're historically victims of racism themselves. Not to mention this had a big risk of empowering people to act in what many would probably consider a bigoted manner. Many whites feel that they face injustice due to their race [1]. Under your proposed moral framework many whites would be justified in discriminating in favor of other whites. Remember, you don't have a monopoly over other people's ideas of who is and isn't benefitting from injustice. 1. https://www.npr.org/2017/10/24/559604836/majority-of-white-americans-think-theyre-discriminated-against https://www.npr.org/2017/10/24/559604836/majority-of-white-a...
• garaetjjte 8y ago
  This reminds me of this article: https://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/les/mongrel.htm https://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/les/mongrel.htm
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• eli 8y ago
  I really and truly want to hire more members of underrepresented groups, but I would never take an applicant's race into account in whether or not to hire them. It sounds legally very questionable and, in any event, is unfair to applicants. We owe it to them to judge them on their merits as an employee as best we can. If we're not getting as many minority applicants as we'd like, it's on us to examine our our culture, recruiting, marketing, inclusivity, benefits, retention, etc.
• burtonator 8y ago
  > I suspect many companies wouldn't use this as it would make affirmative hiring policies more difficult. For example, recruiters at my company curate lists of names that are majority female, black, or Hispanic (pulled from the census bureau) in order to try and determine which candidates are diverse. " I have a dream that ... one day [we will] live in a nation where [people are] not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
• remoteworkerJ 8y ago
  I always use fake name for interviews. I use last name as Einstein or Goldberg often during interviewing. Once I clear interview, I tell them that's my pet name and everyone calls me that. In the last interview my name was Nicola Einstein and I did clear interview with flying colours
• CyberDildonics 8y ago
  > Recruiters at my company aren't explicitly told to hit certain quotas, but they are given larger bonuses for diverse hires and they do have targets for certain percentages of diverse candidate. If 'diversity' means age, sex, race, or religion, this is straight up illegal discrimination.