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Ask HN: How does your company approach hiring diversity?

Ideally this topic won't devolve into an off-topic war. I'm curious how other companies approach diversity. Our company has been tracking diversity and reports on "# of non-male identifying employees" and "# of non-white employees". A coworker just posted about a tool to remove biases from job postings (textio.com), which looks awesome. The response from HR was "we're using that and our job postings are strongly feminine-leaning", which matches towards their stated goals. I've access to a couple of the hiring pipelines, and from speaking with others, our current strategy is: • Headhunt for employees matching the statistics we're looking to grow • Bias our external communication towards those in align with the statistics we're looking to grow • Bias our selection process towards those in align with the statistics we're looking to grow Again, this isn't my job (I do mostly sysadmin-like stuff) and I don't have enough information to give opinions on any of this, but I'm curious if other companies have similar strategies or methods they follow in search of similar goals.

JohnFen 7y ago
Where I work, we just hire the best applicants for the job. As it happens, at least in the dev side of things, the workforce is approximately equal in diversity with the community we're in. The same was true with my previous employer as well.
- verdverm 7y ago
  This is a good point, you should expect your diversity numbers to match locally, to local numbers, not some global number or target. If you are creating an unreasonable target, you are only reintroducing bias into the process. Sounds like what OPs company is doing.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- ambivalents 7y ago
  'we just hire the best applicants for the job' - this irks me everytime I hear it because it is obvious and hard to argue with. Everyone wants to hire the best applicants. The problem to me is that the applicant pool doesn't always represent the best, and is subject to so many variables (time of year, job description language, company reputation, etc.) I think some of those variables can be tweaked to encourage more e.g. women to apply. I know that women (and probably other minorities) are less likely to apply for a job they don't feel qualified for than men. I've noticed some JD's stating to apply anyway -- I always appreciate that gesture.
  - quotemstr 7y ago
    The idea that hiring the best person for a position is "indefensible" is absurd. Civilization is built on putting competent people in charge of important resources. This way, good decisions get made. You can't just arbitrarily mix and match people to achieve some utopian ideal without seriously degrading the overall quality of resource allocation decisions that society makes. Fairness is an excellent goal. If you do it right, fairness is compatible with meritocracy.
    - ambivalents 7y ago
      I misused the word -- it should actually be the opposite, 'defensible.' I will edit my original post. What I mean is that it can be a copout that hiring managers use and is hard to argue with. Almost everyone will agree that hiring the best for the job is the desirable outcome. It just takes for granted that all qualified applicants were even considered.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    > The problem to me is that the applicant pool doesn't always represent the best True, which is why I made the statement narrow -- we hire the best applicants. I make no claim that the applicants are the best devs available in the industry overall. "Best", after all, is context-dependent. A top notch engineer may not be the best for a given position due to other factors. The point I was trying to make is that we hire based on ability, not based on unrelated factors such as trying to hit arbitrary diversity goals. For these companies, the diversity comes naturally as a result of not caring what the race/gender/age of the applicant is. I have no idea, and make no claim about, whether or not the experience at these companies is an exception or a norm. It's just what I've personally seen.
- ThePhysicist 7y ago
  So you employ 50 % women? If not, what’s your metric for measuring the local workforce?
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    Yes. Fully half of the developers at my current employer are women. More than half were women at my previous employer (a large multinational corp). Again, I'm only talking about developers, not the entire company, as the developer pool is the only place I have visibility into.
sergiotapia 7y ago
>Our company has been tracking diversity and reports on "# of non-male identifying employees" and "# of non-white employees". You don't think this is kind of disgusting?
- divrsthrowaway 7y ago
  It's definitely strange to me, but I'm not really informed as to this part of the industry. I'm on the spectrum and spend most of my time reading/working on technical details. I kind of wan't to avoid a subjective analysis here and just see what other companies do for these types of concerns (if they have them).
- natalyarostova 7y ago
  Isn't it funny how these things go? I also have the same disgust reaction as you. Yet when I talk to my wife/friends about their startups being all male, our private and friendly conversations about how to build a more inclusive environment feel productive and healthy. Yet when this natural and friendly desire to build these environments is matched to anodyne corporatized language and KPIs, it begins to feel (and I want to emphasize that this is an emotional reaction) gross and forced. I wonder how we can preserve sincerity at scale...
  - gizmo686 7y ago
    When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Your friendly conversations are about building a more inclusive environment. All else being equal, that results in a more diverse workforce. Measuring inclusivity and fairness is hard, so coorporations instead optimize for a more measurable metric: demographic diversity. The easiest way to optimize that metric is discrimination. Coorporations, being optimization machines look for the most effcient way of optimizing the metric that is (broadly) legal, which still looks fairly discriminatory.
    - natalyarostova 7y ago
      Sounds about right.
twunde 7y ago
So at least in NYC, once you've hit 100ish employees you're required to track diversity to some rough extent (I'm not sure if this is federal, state or local law). One thing that my company has done is to specifically engage with focused diversity groups for hiring (ie one of the bootcamps we hire engineers from is women-only. Other examples is posting new jobs to local veteran group). It's a little weird at first to specifically engage like this, but a better way is to think about how many companies do college recruiting. Often they'll send recruiters to Ivy League universities, which are not diverse in any real sense. While you can continue to do that, you're balancing it out by specifically reaching out to another more diverse source. They all have to hit the same hiring bar, but your pool of candidates is more diverse
- divrsthrowaway 7y ago
  Is this tracking for reporting purposes only, or are there certain incentives/punishments for making/missing on certain metrics?
  - gwbrooks 7y ago
    NYC has its own layer of human-rights law that covers hiring discrimination. And beyond whether discrimination is proven and acted upon, the NYC Commission on Human Rights has proven more than willing to dive into media trials where they essentially shame companies whether or not those companies have been found guilty of a violation.
downerending 7y ago
They require a "diversity statement" for many positions. Presumably that screens out a lot of ideological diversity. Hard to say whether it has much effect on the diversity I assume you mean, as this place has about the same race/gender/etc composition it would have 30 years ago, IMO. It's certainly easier to be "out" than it was back then, which I'm very happy about. But not in a viewpoint sense, which I'm not so happy about. I kind of miss being able to talk openly with my freaky hard-left, hard-right, and generally nutty colleagues. Everyone's gone quiet.
totony 7y ago
This looks illegal afaik, I remember reading that posting job offers to target protected classes (e.g. posting in a men's magazine, restricting facebook ads to men) is illegal https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45569227 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45569227
- ThePhysicist 7y ago
  I don’t think so. In most jurisdictions you’re allowed to take action to reduce inequality and increase diversity, this includes e.g. posting job ads in “women’s” magazines. I think I have seen more than one job ad in such a magazine already (I sometimes read them when I get my hands on one even though I’m not the official target demographic).
  - totony 7y ago
    I tried looking it up, but even Wikipedia seems to suggest this is not the case[1] Do you have any reference I could look at? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action_in_the_Unit... EDIT: Also I believe it's legal to post in a (wo)men's magazine, as long as you post in the other gender's magazine too (e.g. you can't focus on only one demographic)
iaabtpbtpnn 7y ago
It is simply not a factor. We don't discriminate, but we will hire anyone who is willing and able to do the job for the salary offered. We don't track any diversity metrics, and the gender or ethnicity of a candidate does not enter into the hiring equation at all.
- lovegoblin 7y ago
  > the gender or ethnicity of a candidate does not enter into the hiring equation at all. ...consciously. > We don't track any diversity metrics and we can't be sure because we don't measure anything.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - ScalaFan 7y ago
    On the other hand, a law could be passed where all large companies have to report on diversity hiring numbers so that the general public would know what the current reality is like.
    - nailer 7y ago
      So we gather the data. Do we force more been to be school teachers? More women to work in mines?
- pid_0 7y ago
  I agree with this, assuming you account for unconscious bias. With all the tools for blind hiring, it isn't really a problem. We hire for the best engineering competency, period. Our team is incredibly diverse in all sense of the word, not just skin color.
zzo38computer 7y ago
I do not hire anyone, but I can mention what is my opinions of it. They shouldn't care "# of non-male identifying employees" and "# of non-white employees" (except perhaps acting in a movie, and maybe some other kind of jobs (but not computer programming), then it might matter if you are non-male or non-white or non-tall or whatever; which details is more important depend what your job is). You should hire whoever is qualify for the job, whether they are male/female, white/black, etc. Have the equal opportunity; don't force the diversity. Anyways, just having many people (even if they are all white or none white) is still having diversity because you have many different people with different ideas/experiences; they even mentioned this on the CBC radio. (Diversity of ideas is more important, I think.) But you should not prevent having non-white and non-male and so on either; if they are good at the job then they should have this job, whether they are male or not. In a construction work there might be more men than women because on average, men has more physical strength, but, nevertheless they should hire anyone who is capable and willing to do the job, regardless of man/woman. So, in the case of contsruction working it might be "naturally" biased, but, does not mean you should either enforce equality of men/women nor refuse to hire women.
dyeje 7y ago
Woof, these comments. These are pretty standard tactics for increasing diversity. The idea is you want to expend energy filling your outbound pipeline with diverse candidates because your inbound pipeline will naturally fill up with the status quo. You don't lower the bar at all or discriminate against anyone, as many people in this thread are assuming, the key is just bringing in enough people that you find someone who meets the bar from an underrepresented group.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- TheOperator 7y ago
  First, how the shit do you select somebody for a job without discriminating? Do you just select at random? Discrimination by skill is extremely legitimate... Second, OP also clearly is not simply expanding their job search. They're biasing the process in favour of certain identity groups every step of the way. Third, What annoys me the least is people who try to achieve "diversity" by breaking down barriers to employment. What annoys me moderately is people who use heavy-handed methods like discrimination against certain identity groups justifying it as the only way to achieve fairness due to factors like the power of the majority group and pointing out that the work world without such measures is not a meritocracy. What irritates me the absolute most is cowards who discriminate against others because it's their job, but they don't feel okay with it so they deny that they're even doing it, just so they never have to confront and rationalise what they're doing. If you don't have the moral conviction that what you're doing is okay quit your job instead of participating in discrimination you're so uncomfortable with you deny doing it.
  - dyeje 7y ago
    I really don't understand the animosity in this thread against top of funnel diversity tactics. What is so offensive about interviewing more women, people of color, etc? Why do you automatically assume "breaking down barriers to employment"? Do you think people from these groups are inherently unable to pass the same interview?
proc0 7y ago
Do you think a person who happens to be a minority is more likely going to be happy that they got hired for their skills, or for their skin color/gender? How would you feel if you got hired for something other than your skills for the job? Literally everyone loses with diversity hiring. Logic be damned though, right?
- pnunesc 7y ago
  This.
- sevilo 7y ago
  This 1000% Companies looking to make your hiring more diverse, please don't go nagging your potential candidates to apply because "We are looking to increase the percentage of women in our company". It's incredibly insulting and degrading, and then they wonder why the women don't respond to their recruitment emails. Same apply to any other minorities I imagine.
- duxup 7y ago
  For the sake of argument. Hiring practices are pretty random garbage anyway. I don't belive they necessarily find the best fit, best skills or anything else. Thus bypassing a messed up system that doesn't even get what it wants, simply isn't egalitarian (or whatever word we want to use here), doesn't seem so bad.
  - belorn 7y ago
    For companies that think that like, please, hire more people with disabilities. There is a large pool of people who because of health issues are very far from the work pool, and as long you allow for flex time and lower than 100% work hours they can really contribute to society. It would also add to your diversity, even if the categories won't be race and gender.
    - treeman79 7y ago
      Have some crippling disabilities. Result of some minor stokes and other clots. But with flex time I can be highly effective. Like 10x programmer type. But I have days were I can’t get out of bed at all. Last job forced me out since I couldn’t commit to being in office 100% Most Every job I apply for asks if you have a disability. If I say yes or decline to stAte. 100% chance I get passed on. Weeks later job still open. If I say no Disability then a good 50-75% call me. My skill set is awesome and in demand. Highly frustrating
TheOperator 7y ago
I'm a "diverse" white male and I hate it way way more when I'm considered less valuable due to my appearance only to be considered useful to HR again because I check one of their quota checkboxes... Then if there was no discrimination to begin with. Commodifying identity is so gross it makes want to puke. Realise a lot of the roadblocks are going to be things like office culture, language barriers, the lack of appeal of being a minority among a majority (ESPECIALLY if the majority is being discriminated against by HR) Maybe encourage internal hires to recommend and mentor people similar to themselves? If your workplace is located in a "diverse" area than hire locally? Nepotism is less degrading than being subject to institutional discrimination at the hands of the resident HR bigot.
throwaway799075 7y ago
Here's a different approach. I'll refer to women as the "diverse" group but this should vaguely apply to other categories like race or sexual orientation. I'm male, and I'm writing as if you're male, but you don't actually say and this advice might either be unnecessary or irrelevant if you're not, so please make allowances as appropriate. Make sure that no one at your organization is creating a hostile environment toward women. The hostile environment may be invisible to you, and you might not find out unless a woman trusts you and tells you. Text analysis editing whatever tools on your job ads are pointless if your existing female employees are leaving because of this. Conversely, if you have a lot of women already, it will be easier to hire more because they will recommend their female friends, and female applicants will see women there and may feel more comfortable. Make sure you have female management, ideally as executives with real power. That way current and prospective female employees have some basic assurance that the environment won't be totally hostile and that gender-related complaints might be taken seriously. Here's what you can personally do: * Publicly advocate for policies that make it easier for women to exist in your workplace. This does not mean making it hostile for men. There's the obvious stuff like making sure no one has an inappropriately sexy screensaver, but also: if your company has t-shirts, are there any with a female cut? are female bathrooms as accessible and clean as male bathrooms? does your company make no-questions-asked allowances for primary caregivers of children, often women? * Make an effort to be trusted by your female colleagues as someone they can complain about gender bias to. You can do this by publicly advocating for policies that support women and by working toward some gender parity in hiring like you're doing here. Then, ask these women how things are really going. Be prepared to be unpleasantly surprised, but definitely do not disbelieve them as your first reaction. * If your executive team is mostly men, figure out if that can be changed in the near future. Maybe that team is growing too, and you can encourage them not to instantly hire one of their close male friends. If the executive team is heavily male and that can't be changed quickly, then encourage the executive team to be aggressively outspoken about avoiding gender bias. I hope this helps.
pid_0 7y ago
>Our company has been tracking diversity and reports on "# of non-male identifying employees" and "# of non-white employees". Are you sure? This kind of sounds illegal...
Trias11 7y ago
How to get rich quick: 1. Find a company who has senior exec with title of "Diversity Officer" or similar. 2. Apply(1) (1) If you're: black + female + lesbian = jackpot. If you're: white + young + male + straight = tough luck. Move on. PS: I am working with the person who was hired to "fill diversity gap". Don't get me started.
matt_the_bass 7y ago
I agree with hiring based on skills not non-capability metrics. I also believe that a diverse team is valuable (and interesting to me). However one topic that isn’t discussed much in the comments is how one advertises the position. It’s easy to end up advertising (subconsciously) in a way that attracts more of the current majority rather than a diverse applicant pool. For example, most of the team are “bros” and the job description caters to “bros”, then guess who’s more likely to apply for the job? In many cases you’ll miss the best merit based candidate because they are not a “bro” and don’t want to work there. So I do feel it’s important to make job offerings as inclusive as possible. And that sometimes requires non trivial effort. (Replace “bro” with any group of your choice.)
polishdude20 7y ago
The benefits of diversity are that you get a diverse set of experiences and opinions hoping it will lead to better problem solving. The part where many companies go horribly wrong is assuming that diverse experiences are proportional to how diverse their gender pool is or how many different skin colors there are in the office. That's a lazy way of hiring. Hiring someone to fulfill a skin color quota or gender quota is like saying "Hey, you are just like everyone else who tried to apply BUT you are a black woman. So go over here to your desk and be the token black woman of the office." That is essentially what a company is doing when they try and fullfil some race/gender quotas.

JohnFen 7y ago

Where I work, we just hire the best applicants for the job. As it happens, at least in the dev side of things, the workforce is approximately equal in diversity with the community we're in. The same was true with my previous employer as well.

verdverm 7y ago
This is a good point, you should expect your diversity numbers to match locally, to local numbers, not some global number or target. If you are creating an unreasonable target, you are only reintroducing bias into the process. Sounds like what OPs company is doing.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
ambivalents 7y ago
'we just hire the best applicants for the job' - this irks me everytime I hear it because it is obvious and hard to argue with. Everyone wants to hire the best applicants. The problem to me is that the applicant pool doesn't always represent the best, and is subject to so many variables (time of year, job description language, company reputation, etc.) I think some of those variables can be tweaked to encourage more e.g. women to apply. I know that women (and probably other minorities) are less likely to apply for a job they don't feel qualified for than men. I've noticed some JD's stating to apply anyway -- I always appreciate that gesture.
- quotemstr 7y ago
  The idea that hiring the best person for a position is "indefensible" is absurd. Civilization is built on putting competent people in charge of important resources. This way, good decisions get made. You can't just arbitrarily mix and match people to achieve some utopian ideal without seriously degrading the overall quality of resource allocation decisions that society makes. Fairness is an excellent goal. If you do it right, fairness is compatible with meritocracy.
  - ambivalents 7y ago
    I misused the word -- it should actually be the opposite, 'defensible.' I will edit my original post. What I mean is that it can be a copout that hiring managers use and is hard to argue with. Almost everyone will agree that hiring the best for the job is the desirable outcome. It just takes for granted that all qualified applicants were even considered.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > The problem to me is that the applicant pool doesn't always represent the best True, which is why I made the statement narrow -- we hire the best applicants. I make no claim that the applicants are the best devs available in the industry overall. "Best", after all, is context-dependent. A top notch engineer may not be the best for a given position due to other factors. The point I was trying to make is that we hire based on ability, not based on unrelated factors such as trying to hit arbitrary diversity goals. For these companies, the diversity comes naturally as a result of not caring what the race/gender/age of the applicant is. I have no idea, and make no claim about, whether or not the experience at these companies is an exception or a norm. It's just what I've personally seen.
ThePhysicist 7y ago
So you employ 50 % women? If not, what’s your metric for measuring the local workforce?
- JohnFen 7y ago
  Yes. Fully half of the developers at my current employer are women. More than half were women at my previous employer (a large multinational corp). Again, I'm only talking about developers, not the entire company, as the developer pool is the only place I have visibility into.

sergiotapia 7y ago

>Our company has been tracking diversity and reports on "# of non-male identifying employees" and "# of non-white employees". You don't think this is kind of disgusting?

divrsthrowaway 7y ago
It's definitely strange to me, but I'm not really informed as to this part of the industry. I'm on the spectrum and spend most of my time reading/working on technical details. I kind of wan't to avoid a subjective analysis here and just see what other companies do for these types of concerns (if they have them).
natalyarostova 7y ago
Isn't it funny how these things go? I also have the same disgust reaction as you. Yet when I talk to my wife/friends about their startups being all male, our private and friendly conversations about how to build a more inclusive environment feel productive and healthy. Yet when this natural and friendly desire to build these environments is matched to anodyne corporatized language and KPIs, it begins to feel (and I want to emphasize that this is an emotional reaction) gross and forced. I wonder how we can preserve sincerity at scale...
- gizmo686 7y ago
  When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Your friendly conversations are about building a more inclusive environment. All else being equal, that results in a more diverse workforce. Measuring inclusivity and fairness is hard, so coorporations instead optimize for a more measurable metric: demographic diversity. The easiest way to optimize that metric is discrimination. Coorporations, being optimization machines look for the most effcient way of optimizing the metric that is (broadly) legal, which still looks fairly discriminatory.
  - natalyarostova 7y ago
    Sounds about right.

twunde 7y ago

So at least in NYC, once you've hit 100ish employees you're required to track diversity to some rough extent (I'm not sure if this is federal, state or local law). One thing that my company has done is to specifically engage with focused diversity groups for hiring (ie one of the bootcamps we hire engineers from is women-only. Other examples is posting new jobs to local veteran group). It's a little weird at first to specifically engage like this, but a better way is to think about how many companies do college recruiting. Often they'll send recruiters to Ivy League universities, which are not diverse in any real sense. While you can continue to do that, you're balancing it out by specifically reaching out to another more diverse source. They all have to hit the same hiring bar, but your pool of candidates is more diverse

divrsthrowaway 7y ago
Is this tracking for reporting purposes only, or are there certain incentives/punishments for making/missing on certain metrics?
- gwbrooks 7y ago
  NYC has its own layer of human-rights law that covers hiring discrimination. And beyond whether discrimination is proven and acted upon, the NYC Commission on Human Rights has proven more than willing to dive into media trials where they essentially shame companies whether or not those companies have been found guilty of a violation.

downerending 7y ago

They require a "diversity statement" for many positions. Presumably that screens out a lot of ideological diversity. Hard to say whether it has much effect on the diversity I assume you mean, as this place has about the same race/gender/etc composition it would have 30 years ago, IMO. It's certainly easier to be "out" than it was back then, which I'm very happy about. But not in a viewpoint sense, which I'm not so happy about. I kind of miss being able to talk openly with my freaky hard-left, hard-right, and generally nutty colleagues. Everyone's gone quiet.

totony 7y ago

This looks illegal afaik, I remember reading that posting job offers to target protected classes (e.g. posting in a men's magazine, restricting facebook ads to men) is illegal https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45569227 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45569227

ThePhysicist 7y ago
I don’t think so. In most jurisdictions you’re allowed to take action to reduce inequality and increase diversity, this includes e.g. posting job ads in “women’s” magazines. I think I have seen more than one job ad in such a magazine already (I sometimes read them when I get my hands on one even though I’m not the official target demographic).
- totony 7y ago
  I tried looking it up, but even Wikipedia seems to suggest this is not the case[1] Do you have any reference I could look at? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action_in_the_Unit... EDIT: Also I believe it's legal to post in a (wo)men's magazine, as long as you post in the other gender's magazine too (e.g. you can't focus on only one demographic)

iaabtpbtpnn 7y ago

It is simply not a factor. We don't discriminate, but we will hire anyone who is willing and able to do the job for the salary offered. We don't track any diversity metrics, and the gender or ethnicity of a candidate does not enter into the hiring equation at all.

lovegoblin 7y ago
> the gender or ethnicity of a candidate does not enter into the hiring equation at all. ...consciously. > We don't track any diversity metrics and we can't be sure because we don't measure anything.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- ScalaFan 7y ago
  On the other hand, a law could be passed where all large companies have to report on diversity hiring numbers so that the general public would know what the current reality is like.
  - nailer 7y ago
    So we gather the data. Do we force more been to be school teachers? More women to work in mines?
pid_0 7y ago
I agree with this, assuming you account for unconscious bias. With all the tools for blind hiring, it isn't really a problem. We hire for the best engineering competency, period. Our team is incredibly diverse in all sense of the word, not just skin color.

zzo38computer 7y ago

I do not hire anyone, but I can mention what is my opinions of it. They shouldn't care "# of non-male identifying employees" and "# of non-white employees" (except perhaps acting in a movie, and maybe some other kind of jobs (but not computer programming), then it might matter if you are non-male or non-white or non-tall or whatever; which details is more important depend what your job is). You should hire whoever is qualify for the job, whether they are male/female, white/black, etc. Have the equal opportunity; don't force the diversity. Anyways, just having many people (even if they are all white or none white) is still having diversity because you have many different people with different ideas/experiences; they even mentioned this on the CBC radio. (Diversity of ideas is more important, I think.) But you should not prevent having non-white and non-male and so on either; if they are good at the job then they should have this job, whether they are male or not. In a construction work there might be more men than women because on average, men has more physical strength, but, nevertheless they should hire anyone who is capable and willing to do the job, regardless of man/woman. So, in the case of contsruction working it might be "naturally" biased, but, does not mean you should either enforce equality of men/women nor refuse to hire women.

dyeje 7y ago

Woof, these comments. These are pretty standard tactics for increasing diversity. The idea is you want to expend energy filling your outbound pipeline with diverse candidates because your inbound pipeline will naturally fill up with the status quo. You don't lower the bar at all or discriminate against anyone, as many people in this thread are assuming, the key is just bringing in enough people that you find someone who meets the bar from an underrepresented group.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
TheOperator 7y ago
First, how the shit do you select somebody for a job without discriminating? Do you just select at random? Discrimination by skill is extremely legitimate... Second, OP also clearly is not simply expanding their job search. They're biasing the process in favour of certain identity groups every step of the way. Third, What annoys me the least is people who try to achieve "diversity" by breaking down barriers to employment. What annoys me moderately is people who use heavy-handed methods like discrimination against certain identity groups justifying it as the only way to achieve fairness due to factors like the power of the majority group and pointing out that the work world without such measures is not a meritocracy. What irritates me the absolute most is cowards who discriminate against others because it's their job, but they don't feel okay with it so they deny that they're even doing it, just so they never have to confront and rationalise what they're doing. If you don't have the moral conviction that what you're doing is okay quit your job instead of participating in discrimination you're so uncomfortable with you deny doing it.
- dyeje 7y ago
  I really don't understand the animosity in this thread against top of funnel diversity tactics. What is so offensive about interviewing more women, people of color, etc? Why do you automatically assume "breaking down barriers to employment"? Do you think people from these groups are inherently unable to pass the same interview?

proc0 7y ago

Do you think a person who happens to be a minority is more likely going to be happy that they got hired for their skills, or for their skin color/gender? How would you feel if you got hired for something other than your skills for the job? Literally everyone loses with diversity hiring. Logic be damned though, right?

pnunesc 7y ago
This.
sevilo 7y ago
This 1000% Companies looking to make your hiring more diverse, please don't go nagging your potential candidates to apply because "We are looking to increase the percentage of women in our company". It's incredibly insulting and degrading, and then they wonder why the women don't respond to their recruitment emails. Same apply to any other minorities I imagine.
duxup 7y ago
For the sake of argument. Hiring practices are pretty random garbage anyway. I don't belive they necessarily find the best fit, best skills or anything else. Thus bypassing a messed up system that doesn't even get what it wants, simply isn't egalitarian (or whatever word we want to use here), doesn't seem so bad.
- belorn 7y ago
  For companies that think that like, please, hire more people with disabilities. There is a large pool of people who because of health issues are very far from the work pool, and as long you allow for flex time and lower than 100% work hours they can really contribute to society. It would also add to your diversity, even if the categories won't be race and gender.
  - treeman79 7y ago
    Have some crippling disabilities. Result of some minor stokes and other clots. But with flex time I can be highly effective. Like 10x programmer type. But I have days were I can’t get out of bed at all. Last job forced me out since I couldn’t commit to being in office 100% Most Every job I apply for asks if you have a disability. If I say yes or decline to stAte. 100% chance I get passed on. Weeks later job still open. If I say no Disability then a good 50-75% call me. My skill set is awesome and in demand. Highly frustrating

TheOperator 7y ago

I'm a "diverse" white male and I hate it way way more when I'm considered less valuable due to my appearance only to be considered useful to HR again because I check one of their quota checkboxes... Then if there was no discrimination to begin with. Commodifying identity is so gross it makes want to puke. Realise a lot of the roadblocks are going to be things like office culture, language barriers, the lack of appeal of being a minority among a majority (ESPECIALLY if the majority is being discriminated against by HR) Maybe encourage internal hires to recommend and mentor people similar to themselves? If your workplace is located in a "diverse" area than hire locally? Nepotism is less degrading than being subject to institutional discrimination at the hands of the resident HR bigot.

throwaway799075 7y ago

Here's a different approach. I'll refer to women as the "diverse" group but this should vaguely apply to other categories like race or sexual orientation. I'm male, and I'm writing as if you're male, but you don't actually say and this advice might either be unnecessary or irrelevant if you're not, so please make allowances as appropriate. Make sure that no one at your organization is creating a hostile environment toward women. The hostile environment may be invisible to you, and you might not find out unless a woman trusts you and tells you. Text analysis editing whatever tools on your job ads are pointless if your existing female employees are leaving because of this. Conversely, if you have a lot of women already, it will be easier to hire more because they will recommend their female friends, and female applicants will see women there and may feel more comfortable. Make sure you have female management, ideally as executives with real power. That way current and prospective female employees have some basic assurance that the environment won't be totally hostile and that gender-related complaints might be taken seriously. Here's what you can personally do: * Publicly advocate for policies that make it easier for women to exist in your workplace. This does not mean making it hostile for men. There's the obvious stuff like making sure no one has an inappropriately sexy screensaver, but also: if your company has t-shirts, are there any with a female cut? are female bathrooms as accessible and clean as male bathrooms? does your company make no-questions-asked allowances for primary caregivers of children, often women? * Make an effort to be trusted by your female colleagues as someone they can complain about gender bias to. You can do this by publicly advocating for policies that support women and by working toward some gender parity in hiring like you're doing here. Then, ask these women how things are really going. Be prepared to be unpleasantly surprised, but definitely do not disbelieve them as your first reaction. * If your executive team is mostly men, figure out if that can be changed in the near future. Maybe that team is growing too, and you can encourage them not to instantly hire one of their close male friends. If the executive team is heavily male and that can't be changed quickly, then encourage the executive team to be aggressively outspoken about avoiding gender bias. I hope this helps.

pid_0 7y ago

>Our company has been tracking diversity and reports on "# of non-male identifying employees" and "# of non-white employees". Are you sure? This kind of sounds illegal...

Trias11 7y ago

How to get rich quick: 1. Find a company who has senior exec with title of "Diversity Officer" or similar. 2. Apply(1) (1) If you're: black + female + lesbian = jackpot. If you're: white + young + male + straight = tough luck. Move on. PS: I am working with the person who was hired to "fill diversity gap". Don't get me started.

matt_the_bass 7y ago

I agree with hiring based on skills not non-capability metrics. I also believe that a diverse team is valuable (and interesting to me). However one topic that isn’t discussed much in the comments is how one advertises the position. It’s easy to end up advertising (subconsciously) in a way that attracts more of the current majority rather than a diverse applicant pool. For example, most of the team are “bros” and the job description caters to “bros”, then guess who’s more likely to apply for the job? In many cases you’ll miss the best merit based candidate because they are not a “bro” and don’t want to work there. So I do feel it’s important to make job offerings as inclusive as possible. And that sometimes requires non trivial effort. (Replace “bro” with any group of your choice.)

polishdude20 7y ago

The benefits of diversity are that you get a diverse set of experiences and opinions hoping it will lead to better problem solving. The part where many companies go horribly wrong is assuming that diverse experiences are proportional to how diverse their gender pool is or how many different skin colors there are in the office. That's a lazy way of hiring. Hiring someone to fulfill a skin color quota or gender quota is like saying "Hey, you are just like everyone else who tried to apply BUT you are a black woman. So go over here to your desk and be the token black woman of the office." That is essentially what a company is doing when they try and fullfil some race/gender quotas.