4 ms·

The exciting thing if you are a hiring manager is that, as long as there is talent that is being passed-over for the wrong reasons, you can beat your competitor

by sakoht 7y ago

The exciting thing if you are a hiring manager is that, as long as there is talent that is being passed-over for the wrong reasons, you can beat your competitors in one of the most challenging ares of building a compay by being good at avoiding this error. A friend noted recently that a compounding benefit of hiring a gender-balanced team early is you won't lose female talent you find later when they refuse to join a team of all guys. But you have to be careful too, to not hire someone just because they fit a social profile you want more of on the team. Talented women don't want to be on a team where all of the women there were "tossed a softball". It's not only condescending, but it fosters the bias it intends to combat. Whoever is at fault, it is that there is a gender imbalance is worthy of debate. But addressing it is best viewed as opportunity, not an act of charity, if seen through the right lens.

snowwrestler 7y ago
This is exactly right and why corporate leaders are increasingly focused on diversity as a metric they manage to. Essentially they have realized that many recruiting and hiring functions are underperforming, in that they are rejecting, or allowing others to reject, talented candidates who they should have hired. And what they are realizing is that it is much harder than it seems to avoid this kind of error. Which means that even though they can see the opportunity you mention, they're finding that their companies can't seem to seize it. Generally speaking, everyone involved in hiring is doing their jobs in good faith; there are very few mustache-twirling villains to be found and defeated. But every single person has preferences and biases which, even if essentially harmless on a personal level, can still create significant effects in the aggregate. So leaders are trying to boot-strap more diverse cultures by managing to the outcome. It's far easier to reward a hiring function for increasing certain metrics of diversity, than tell them something like "be less racist and sexist when hiring." I mean, the vast majority of people would rightly take offense at that kind of guidance from their boss. The hope is that in the long run, increasing staff diversity produces a broader mix of preferences and biases, which in aggregate reduces the skew against certain talented candidates. As you say: a compounding effect.
zanny 7y ago
The irony of this thinking is that if you do the whole "teams must be gender balanced" routine early on where you are getting the 5-1 or worse ratio of men to women applying for a software position you can often be the one passing over way more talent than the company with the toxic white-male dominated culture lacking diversity. If men and women are equally good at the job (and in programming there is no reason to think otherwise) and you have 1,000 men and 200 women applying and there is a uniform distribution of talent there are going to be 200 men and 40 women in the top quintile, and if you are hiring 200 overall that means you are passing over 100 top tier men for 40 second and 20 third tier women. And by trying to discriminate to correct discrimination you leave the ~66 men you would have on average hired instead if you went purely based off choosing the "best" candidates for the job in the same position as minorities historically rejected from work due to the inverse bias - they get declined from the position because of facets of their being they have no control over, not on their own merit for the job. Avoiding bias in hiring can never be as hamfisted as "hire equal numbers of X always" without causing a ton of harm in the process. Especially when you start trying to always hire an equal number of men and women, every ethnicity, every religion, every spoken language, every sexual orientation, every country of origin, etc. There has to be a balance between being inhospitable to diversity and using discrimination to force arbitrary amounts of diversity.
- iovrthoughtthis 7y ago
  Simply applying normal statistics to candidates feels wrong as we usually have to make the “random independent variable” assumption for the simple statistical analysis we do. I fairly certain that assumption does not hold about humans. Our social environment has a direct impact on our work outcomes. Ergo, simply picking the top best candidates for some individual measure candidates does not guarantee the best work outcomes and so, depending on the effect size, doesn’t necessarily confer any advantage.
throwaway8692 7y ago
Given the complexity of the feelings a lot of people have and are developing over time, I think it's worth emphasizing how the push for gender balance can backfire. The linked writeup mentions "diversity fatigue", and it can turn people who would otherwise support fixing the pipeline into cynics. We have a woman who was hired on my team at work. As soon as management saw an actual woman had applied, the interview process was just a formality. She has been with us for several months now and has performed abysmally. If she were a white guy she would not have made it in the front door. Working with her is a constant frustration - explaining basic programming concepts and constantly reminding her what the current task is when she gets distracted looking at cat pictures. The issue is that the male members of the team resent her and our bosses because she's unfireable as a woman. We want in good faith to support women and other demographics that might be interested in our field! We'd love to do whatever we can to foster interest among any human beings at any stage of the pipeline! But what we're coming to realize is that because management needs to meet some "quota", we'll be providing a subsistence for a net-negative-productivity member of the team for the foreseeable future. Nobody can say a word about it to our manager or director for fear of being labeled a sexist. It's making us resent the whole push for diversity as a whole.
- draw_down 7y ago
  That situation sucks, but it’s possible do anything the wrong way, including diversity.
- iovrthoughtthis 7y ago
  “When she gets distracted looking at cat pictures” This is not the behaviour of someone who is comfortable and enjoying their job. Has anyone reached out to your female colleague to ask if everything is ok. What their goals and aspirations are and how the company can help them reach those? Could you all just be sitting back watching a team member fail not helping because of their gender and your fear of talking to them / management about them? This whole situation could it’s self be a manifestation of sexism. Not even intentionally.
  - thu2111 7y ago
trophycase 7y ago
Yes but this is literally the point of an interview. Strip away what it says "on paper" and engage with the person directly. I'd say if they were passing over talent in the past then that's an issue with their interview process.

by sakoht 7y ago

snowwrestler 7y ago

This is exactly right and why corporate leaders are increasingly focused on diversity as a metric they manage to. Essentially they have realized that many recruiting and hiring functions are underperforming, in that they are rejecting, or allowing others to reject, talented candidates who they should have hired. And what they are realizing is that it is much harder than it seems to avoid this kind of error. Which means that even though they can see the opportunity you mention, they're finding that their companies can't seem to seize it. Generally speaking, everyone involved in hiring is doing their jobs in good faith; there are very few mustache-twirling villains to be found and defeated. But every single person has preferences and biases which, even if essentially harmless on a personal level, can still create significant effects in the aggregate. So leaders are trying to boot-strap more diverse cultures by managing to the outcome. It's far easier to reward a hiring function for increasing certain metrics of diversity, than tell them something like "be less racist and sexist when hiring." I mean, the vast majority of people would rightly take offense at that kind of guidance from their boss. The hope is that in the long run, increasing staff diversity produces a broader mix of preferences and biases, which in aggregate reduces the skew against certain talented candidates. As you say: a compounding effect.

zanny 7y ago

The irony of this thinking is that if you do the whole "teams must be gender balanced" routine early on where you are getting the 5-1 or worse ratio of men to women applying for a software position you can often be the one passing over way more talent than the company with the toxic white-male dominated culture lacking diversity. If men and women are equally good at the job (and in programming there is no reason to think otherwise) and you have 1,000 men and 200 women applying and there is a uniform distribution of talent there are going to be 200 men and 40 women in the top quintile, and if you are hiring 200 overall that means you are passing over 100 top tier men for 40 second and 20 third tier women. And by trying to discriminate to correct discrimination you leave the ~66 men you would have on average hired instead if you went purely based off choosing the "best" candidates for the job in the same position as minorities historically rejected from work due to the inverse bias - they get declined from the position because of facets of their being they have no control over, not on their own merit for the job. Avoiding bias in hiring can never be as hamfisted as "hire equal numbers of X always" without causing a ton of harm in the process. Especially when you start trying to always hire an equal number of men and women, every ethnicity, every religion, every spoken language, every sexual orientation, every country of origin, etc. There has to be a balance between being inhospitable to diversity and using discrimination to force arbitrary amounts of diversity.

iovrthoughtthis 7y ago
Simply applying normal statistics to candidates feels wrong as we usually have to make the “random independent variable” assumption for the simple statistical analysis we do. I fairly certain that assumption does not hold about humans. Our social environment has a direct impact on our work outcomes. Ergo, simply picking the top best candidates for some individual measure candidates does not guarantee the best work outcomes and so, depending on the effect size, doesn’t necessarily confer any advantage.

throwaway8692 7y ago

Given the complexity of the feelings a lot of people have and are developing over time, I think it's worth emphasizing how the push for gender balance can backfire. The linked writeup mentions "diversity fatigue", and it can turn people who would otherwise support fixing the pipeline into cynics. We have a woman who was hired on my team at work. As soon as management saw an actual woman had applied, the interview process was just a formality. She has been with us for several months now and has performed abysmally. If she were a white guy she would not have made it in the front door. Working with her is a constant frustration - explaining basic programming concepts and constantly reminding her what the current task is when she gets distracted looking at cat pictures. The issue is that the male members of the team resent her and our bosses because she's unfireable as a woman. We want in good faith to support women and other demographics that might be interested in our field! We'd love to do whatever we can to foster interest among any human beings at any stage of the pipeline! But what we're coming to realize is that because management needs to meet some "quota", we'll be providing a subsistence for a net-negative-productivity member of the team for the foreseeable future. Nobody can say a word about it to our manager or director for fear of being labeled a sexist. It's making us resent the whole push for diversity as a whole.

draw_down 7y ago
That situation sucks, but it’s possible do anything the wrong way, including diversity.
iovrthoughtthis 7y ago
“When she gets distracted looking at cat pictures” This is not the behaviour of someone who is comfortable and enjoying their job. Has anyone reached out to your female colleague to ask if everything is ok. What their goals and aspirations are and how the company can help them reach those? Could you all just be sitting back watching a team member fail not helping because of their gender and your fear of talking to them / management about them? This whole situation could it’s self be a manifestation of sexism. Not even intentionally.
- thu2111 7y ago

trophycase 7y ago

Yes but this is literally the point of an interview. Strip away what it says "on paper" and engage with the person directly. I'd say if they were passing over talent in the past then that's an issue with their interview process.