Director of engineering at a former employer once said in the span of 30 seconds: “we’re trying to hire more diversity” and “please reach out to your social network”.
To an audience of 98% white males.
The director acknowledged the incongruity, thankfully, but never solved the problem.
I think you're assuming white males don't know how to suggest females and non-whites. We may be statistically more likely to hang out with other white males but I'm pretty sure I can suggest people besides them.
I can and did, but that doesn’t alter the fact that the preponderance of our collective networks were white males. That’s not a strategy for significant diversification.
Replace “don’t know how to” with “don’t know” and it would be more appropriate.
I know plenty of women in the industry, but for the specialty I would recommend for, I couldn’t list more than a couple of names (of which are well employed already).
I can't speak for others, but I'm a white male and less than 98% of the people I know are other white males. This is also true when I limit myself to software developers (but to a lesser degree). It seems to me that reaching out to ones social network would be an improvement. At 98% white males there's not much you can do to make it worse.
I must have spent the last 20 years in a parallel universe where every single hiring manager would like nothing more than to hire a minority or a woman because of corporate edicts. At Microsoft today, for instance, they have _quotas_ for hiring women (I don't know about minorities, but they probably have quotas for that, too), and if you don't meet the quota, you're kinda fucked as a manager. At Google, when the hiring committee is in doubt the official position is to make a "hire" decision if the applicant is a woman and "no" if the applicant is a man. A female hiring committee member told me she saw no issue with this policy.
Yet still, very few females apply. I had interviewed 100+ people for Google. Of them IIRC 8 were women and 1 was hired. You can't get more women into the profession if they choose not to apply.
What kind of person would be qualified for a job but not be actively looking at job boards and LinkedIn? This article is only talking about passive job-seekers being targeted on Facebook, not about active job-seekers being discriminated against.
I've never got a job in response to an ad either. Have you? Do you personally know anyone who has?
Another issue, with workplace politics and edicts being what they are, wouldn't white men be a better category of applicants to exclude via such targeting? I'm pretty sure this is happening as we speak. I don't view this as a problem, though, for the reason alluded to above: approximately nobody in tech lands jobs in response to ads.
Do you mean ads in general or posting to public job listings? Because all my jobs have come from the later and it's been the primary hiring pipeline everywhere I've worked. Can't say I've seen a lot of hiring from general advertising channels but if they're paying for the ads then they're presumably hiring from that channel.
I thought the issue here was with demographically targetable ads on e.g. Google or Facebook. I've been a hiring manager in the past, and we never used those. Most of our entry level employees were from career fairs at the nearby university. Most of our senior employees were either from the network or from (ultra-expensive) recruiters. Frankly it never even occurred to anyone to purchase targeted ads because they're so uncommon.
That isn’t completely true. You can land a job via an ad, it is very very hard, but it is probably a bit higher than 1%. Especially entry level positions where a professional network isn’t expected anyways.
Be that as it may, if I were a hiring manager today whose bonus and promo opportunities depend on meeting the diversity quota, you can guess how I'd be setting up the targeting on my hiring ad campaign, ethics be damned.
That having been said, I fully agree that such targeting in job ads in particular should be illegal. I agree with this out of my own rational self interest, as a straight white male in my 40s. Other aforementioned types of gender, racial, and age discrimination should be made illegal as well.
Well, if you were smart about it you wouldn’t focus on ads at all. Rather you’d figure out how to poach known talent from other companies. Easier still if you were looking for entry levels, hitting the universities directly would work given recent enrollment increases (start them out with good internships during the sophomore or junior years would be much more useful here).
I don’t see how an ad would be effective at all in this hiring climate. Yes, you might get something, but you would be unlikely to get a woman or underrepresented minority hire, even if they were specifically targeted. They have much better options than to answer these ads.
That's exactly what we did, with a modicum of success. The pickings are super slim, though. Most CS students don't really seem to give a shit about CS, meaning they don't do anything other than coursework, at all, and their coursework is pretty primitive, and uses Java which our company had no use for.
Another problem is when you go to career fairs, easily 9 out of 10 people coming to your booth will be looking for an internship rather than a job. This isn't a problem per se, if you're a large company this is actually pretty great. But I was hiring for a small (at the time) startup, so that was a bit of a waste of everyone's time. Still we landed a few diamonds in the rough after a few attempts. 8/10, would hire from local schools again.
Ironically, the most extensively qualified candidate I met at these career fairs was female. She was in grad school and had a resume you wouldn't believe if you'd seen it, and very obviously smart as a whip. She was, however, too smart to work for a startup. Can't say I blame her.
Out of curiosity, how where the applicants selected for the interviews? Because first you limit the funnel for a certain group of people at the very start, then you have maybe an algorithm with a selection bias against the same group before we end up with an potentially also biased interview process before we reach an equally biased work life. I less we have reliable numbers for the funnel just looking at the interview stage misses the whole point.
No idea. Likely through the usual (for Google) means: candidate submits a resume directly to the company, resume is reviewed by sourcer, and a decision is made on whether to interview based on qualifications. I can pretty much guarantee that women not only aren't discriminated at this stage, but given preference if there's any doubt at all. Tech companies are under immense pressure nowadays to improve their diversity metrics. The fact that they are unable to do so is quite telling, IMO.
Do you actually know of any high paying jobs completely dominated by white men anymore? Plenty of non-white doctors, scientists and engineers certainly.
