Quote:
Originally Posted by ferrets_bueller
Good afternoon.
I am an aging baby boomer, who also runs a 40 person enterprise, I have a total of four officers, including myself. The profile of these four people demonstrates that there are two men, and two women. One is African American, who just replaced a Mexican American. One is gay, and one is Asian American. One is a veteran.
There are four junior officers. Two men, two women.
So I think we ring most of the bells on diversity. I bring this up because the entity has always followed one and only one principle on hiring and promotions: Hire or promote the most qualified individual. Period. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/15/b...rd-hudson.html |
This is a consistent refrain from those who push back on diversity efforts. [And here is where I will insert that I am no longer addressing your approach or criticizing you.] When one is truly looking for talent and has solved one's implicit bias and confirmation bias issues which
necessarily influence one's perception of who is the most qualified individual, then I suppose it's very easy to put together a diverse senior staff and board.
However, there are a number of problems with "Hire or promote the most qualified individual." First, when it comes to initial hiring to mid-level staffing to executive level promotions to lateral hiring, there are tons of biases that affect the determination of who is "most qualified." As an example, a practice group at the firm was seeking a senior-level associate in the lateral market last year. The firm called their usual headhunters and asked for candidates. One of the partners in the group sits on the diversity committee, and after receiving resumes for nothing but white candidates asked the headhunters to find some diverse candidates. Within a week, they presented her with six highly qualified diverse candidates, 2 or 3 of whom were considerably
more qualified than the candidates in the group they were previously presented with. They hired someone diverse and asked their headhunter why they had to specifically request qualified diverse candidates. Response?: <<Shrug.>> "We didn't know you were looking for diverse candidates." No acknowledgment that initially they specifically requested the most qualified candidates, which should include fucking
everyone. This is what we're facing.
Second, how do you determine what "most qualified" is? Is it someone who went to Choate, Harvard, Harvard and started their career at Wachtell? Or is it someone who went to a shitty public school, got a scholarship to a state school, moved on to a second tier law school, but placed high in their class, and started working at a smaller firm and had tons of responsibility from day 1? I sit on the hiring committee here and the ones who constantly push for the Harvard types (who aren't going to accept our offer anyway)
didn't fucking go to Harvard. They don't even understand what makes
them qualified. But they want a kid who cruised through Harvard and probably got in because they're a legacy over a kid from BU who absolutely killed themselves their whole lives and excelled at a lower ranked school.
Third, every single partner who we have to talk to about hiring diverse students, using diverse associates, or promoting diverse candidates, immediately respond with, "Why shouldn't I go with the most qualified person?" It's shorthand for "the diverse person isn't qualified somehow" even though that person has never even given that person a look.
So, congratulations on having a diverse senior team. (Seriously.) That's pretty cool. But I will tell you that this kind of mechanical, "most qualified" response when it comes to diversity initiatives is often one of the hurdles to be overcome when making progress.
TM
