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The reaction you had resonated with me in that it's the feeling I most want to avoid giving someone else. I'm a white male hiring manager who is often incorpora
by tonystubblebine 6y ago
The reaction you had resonated with me in that it's the feeling I most want to avoid giving someone else. I'm a white male hiring manager who is often incorporating explicit diversity/inclusion strategies into work. It's tricky--like tap dancing around all the ways that the work can go wrong. And this is one I overindex for. I never want someone to think they are a token.
IMO, there are five main motivations for having a diversity & inclusion strategy. One is legal, to avoid breaking a law or facing a lawsuit. One is PR so that general public doesn't yell at you. The other three are a belief that it's the right thing to do, belief that it creates a more interesting or fun culture, belief that it will make the company more money.
I'm basically subscribed to all five. But I almost always lead with just the last one: diversity & inclusion helps the business by helping the business make better decisions, helps find higher quality candidates, helps avoid product/marketing blindspots that limit the reach of a product. All of those things boil down to: it's good for business.
This is the tap dancing. It's almost uncouth to tell an employee that you only care about their ability to help the business make money. But there's also something really unhealthy about not mentioning it at all. Of course, the business cares about an employee's happiness and positive social impact, but those aren't the foundation of the relationship. The foundation is the thing that allows the employment in the first place, which is making money.
I like leading with that good-for-business foundation because then if, say, I went out recruiting Native Americans, they can see a visible concrete motivation beyond tokenism. It's a relatively straightforward business hypothesis to think: "I bet this group of people doesn't see a lot of recruiters so if I get good at recruiting from that group then I'll be facing less competition from other recruiters."
That's a hypothesis that I've found to generally be true, especially when paired with at least a mediocre level of inclusivity after you make a hire. It's like a sad arbitrage that allows you to take advantage of industry bias. Statistically, hiring from an underrepresented group means fewer counter offers, and if you follow up by creating good opportunity for growth, a lot of people will way out perform their peers simply because other jobs had never given them much opportunity.
It's all about how do you talk about these issues which are real, and which are impossible for me to viscerally understand with my own limited & privileged life experience, in a way that doesn't sound like charity and instead sounds like raising the bar. "I know your past resume sucks, but you're here because we think you could out perform your past work by a lot."
- _marypoza_ 6y agoI would say the best way to make sure the diversity hires don't feel like being a token is by establishing a fair recruitment process. How? The more concrete the selection criteria better, so don't fall in the unconscious bias trap of assessing different candidates through different lens. Since it's good for business, inclusivity policies should be considered an investment and not an expense. The best way is involving the employees directly (are anonymous surveys that hard to pull of?) and ask them what they need. Giving you a concrete example: As a woman in tech, I've work in tons of places with pingue pongue tables and beer on the community fridge. That doesn't really appeal to me, since I prefer to leave work as soon as possible to work in my non-paid female duties. But I would be SO APPRECIATED that the female toilets had menstrual products available just like toilet paper. It would have a relevant impact in reducing my monthly expenses and would make me be a better professional because it's something that would stop being part of my day-to-day logistics. Every time I suggest this, I am told it's too expensive or the H.R. men don't know how to buy it. There is always a residual number of females on the teams, is that really a great expense? And I learn to code every language my company asks me too but the HR can't learn how to buy properly menstrual pads? Please just asks us!
- traverseda 6y ago>One is legal, to avoid breaking a law or facing a lawsuit. I don't really understand this. Isn't any kind of race based discrimination going to potentially cause legal liability? At the end of the day you're advocating for a policy of race/gender based discrimination, and I don't really get why you'd think it wouldn't be opening yourself up to liability with programs like these? Have you actually talked to a lawyer about this? I've looked into in the the past, and while it seems to have a stronger case in Canada (where I live) I haven't really seen anything to suggest it's legal in the US unless you're a school. Admittedly you're probably not going to be the case the brings it tumbling down, but it still seems like explicitly basing your hiring decisions on race open you up to a whole lot of potential liability.
- tonystubblebine 6y agoI don’t know anything about IBMs situation. But for me, a much smaller company, there’s a difference between saying you will only hire a Native American and saying you have intentionally chosen to put up a hiring booth at a Native American conference. In practice they have similar outcomes but the first is illegal, as you say, and the second isn’t. Every hiring pipeline will have demographic biases in it. And there is no law saying you have to investigate every single pipeline. But in practice how you choose your pipelines plays a big role in the demographics of your hires. I think too that this is not discrimination because it is merit based. I’m saying that because of other people’s discrimination you could probably operate on a valid business ROI hypothesis that choosing more diverse pipelines is a better use of a hiring managers time and money.