Comment by __turbobrew__
2 months ago
Yea when I have done hiring the vast majority of applicants were of specific races and demographics. It isn’t a private companies’ job to skew hiring outcomes away from the demographics of the incoming pool of qualified applicants. If you have 95% female applicants for a position I would expect that roughly 95% of hires are going to be female and vice versa.
I think it is damaging when hiring outcomes are skewed as well as it undermines the credibility of those who got hired under easier conditions fabricated by the company.
I too agree with the grandparent post that we should try to be scrubbing PII from applications as much as possible. I do code interviews at BIGCO and for some reason recruiting sends me the applicants resume which is totally irrelevant to the code interview and offers more opportunities for biases to slip in (i.e this person went to MIT vs this person went to no name community college).
> If you have 95% female applicants for a position I would expect that roughly 95% of hires are going to be female and vice versa.
I would disagree for the most part. As mentioned above, there are roles where you'll see gender bias that may not be addressable. In the OB/GYN example, I understand some women would only be comfortable with a doctor that is also a woman. That's not necessarily addressable by shoe-horning in male doctors. But again, that can be accounted for in DEI programs.
It's also more understandable to non-remote jobs. Some areas have staggeringly different demographics that could only really be changed by relocating candidates, which isn't feasible for all business. Mentioning this specifically as my company is fully remote.
Otherwise, in my opinion, a candidate pool that is 95% some demographic shows a severe deficiency in the ability to attract candidates.
> Otherwise, in my opinion, a candidate pool that is 95% some demographic shows a severe deficiency in the ability to attract candidates.
If the job in question is 95% one gender it does not at all show a deficiency in attracting candidates. 87% of pharmeceutical technicans are women (in the uk) as per: https://careersmart.org.uk/occupations/equality/which-jobs-d...
If I'm interviewing for pharmaceutical technicians, and my goals is to give all candidates equal opportunity for employment, why would I expect something vastly different from 87% women? If the candidate pool for pharmaceutical technicians was somehow 50/50, then it'd indicate a severe deficiency in attracting female candidates on account of the massive underrepresentation relative to the workforce of pharmaceutical technicians.