
Ask HN: How does your company approach hiring diversity? - divrsthrowaway
Ideally this topic won&#x27;t devolve into an off-topic war.<p>I&#x27;m curious how other companies approach diversity.<p>Our company has been tracking diversity and reports on &quot;# of non-male identifying employees&quot; and &quot;# of non-white employees&quot;.<p>A coworker just posted about a tool to remove biases from job postings (textio.com), which looks awesome.<p>The response from HR was &quot;we&#x27;re using that and our job postings are strongly feminine-leaning&quot;, which matches towards their stated goals.<p>I&#x27;ve access to a couple of the hiring pipelines, and from speaking with others, our current strategy is:<p>• Headhunt for employees matching the statistics we&#x27;re looking to grow
• Bias our external communication towards those in align with the statistics we&#x27;re looking to grow
• Bias our selection process towards those in align with the statistics we&#x27;re looking to grow<p>Again, this isn&#x27;t my job (I do mostly sysadmin-like stuff) and I don&#x27;t have enough information to give opinions on any of this, but I&#x27;m curious if other companies have similar strategies or methods they follow in search of similar goals.
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iaabtpbtpnn
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
> 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.

~~~
ScalaFan
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
So we gather the data. Do we force more been to be school teachers? More women
to work in mines?

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proc0
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?

~~~
duxup
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
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
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

~~~
gizmo686
Every job I have applied for asks if I have a disability (I believe it is a
requirement for reporting purposes here in the US). I routinely decline to
state (because I do not know what an accurate answer would be), and am not
aware of that ever causing me to be rejected.

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zzo38computer
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.

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downerending
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.

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JohnFen
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.

~~~
ambivalents
'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
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
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.

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TheOperator
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.

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polishdude20
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.

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sergiotapia
>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?

~~~
natalyarostova
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
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
Sounds about right.

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dyeje
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.

~~~
TheOperator
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
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?

~~~
TheOperator
>Do you think people from these groups are inherently unable to pass the same
interview?

I've had two job search workers insist on those "top of funnel" tactics when I
searched for a job and when I refused two separate workers refused to give me
an interview through anything but a diversity recruiter. I didn't really want
to take a job from somebody who would hire me just because I went over one of
their lines and checked the right boxes and not because I was the best.

------
matt_the_bass
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.)

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totony
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
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
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_Unit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action_in_the_United_States)

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)

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twunde
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
Is this tracking for reporting purposes only, or are there certain
incentives/punishments for making/missing on certain metrics?

~~~
gwbrooks
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.

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pid_0
>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...

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throwaway799075
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.

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Trias11
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.

