If you are selecting for anything besides competence, your chances of getting competence is effectively random. It says nothing about one group of people being more or less competent than another.
I have observed that selecting for competence leads to diversity, and I believe that diversity is a strength. But it is best achieved organically.
Personally I think the shortcomings we have with achieving diversity is in the framing stage, not the hiring stage.
Can you speak more about the framing? I think diversity should be encouraged, but I also believe to some extent that people of color have been left out of STEM education and jobs due to poor education and opportunities. Maybe a middle ground is to hire for both. Bring in women, people of color, and others who may not be as educated or experienced, but make a serious effort to pair them with more experienced employees and train them up to where they should be. Rather than hire and replace, as some have suggested, hire and partner to diversify and holistically improve the entire organization.
In some industries when you have diversity targets you need to lower the standards a lot. Why? Because the competence-based hiring and promotion process will not get you enough good candidates to meet the diversity targets, so you take shortcuts like Boeing did with QC.
According to StackOverflow survey a few years ago with a huge (relevant) number of answers, about 8% of people in the domain were women. Some companies have targets of 50 to 70% women. How do you think these targets are met? My company had 70% target and we are close; we hired any woman that ever applied, no questions asked, no tech interview. I managed the IT recruiting for an entire region over 5 years, I quit that role when the tech interviews were forbidden in order to meet targets.
Why do you think one is at odds with the other?
If you are selecting for anything besides competence, your chances of getting competence is effectively random. It says nothing about one group of people being more or less competent than another.
I have observed that selecting for competence leads to diversity, and I believe that diversity is a strength. But it is best achieved organically.
Personally I think the shortcomings we have with achieving diversity is in the framing stage, not the hiring stage.
Can you speak more about the framing? I think diversity should be encouraged, but I also believe to some extent that people of color have been left out of STEM education and jobs due to poor education and opportunities. Maybe a middle ground is to hire for both. Bring in women, people of color, and others who may not be as educated or experienced, but make a serious effort to pair them with more experienced employees and train them up to where they should be. Rather than hire and replace, as some have suggested, hire and partner to diversify and holistically improve the entire organization.
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In some industries when you have diversity targets you need to lower the standards a lot. Why? Because the competence-based hiring and promotion process will not get you enough good candidates to meet the diversity targets, so you take shortcuts like Boeing did with QC.
According to StackOverflow survey a few years ago with a huge (relevant) number of answers, about 8% of people in the domain were women. Some companies have targets of 50 to 70% women. How do you think these targets are met? My company had 70% target and we are close; we hired any woman that ever applied, no questions asked, no tech interview. I managed the IT recruiting for an entire region over 5 years, I quit that role when the tech interviews were forbidden in order to meet targets.