When is 'Diversity' Discrimination?

So this thread is sort of a rant, but it has political value from the business world perspective. That's why I have added it to the Political Madness forum. Mods if you feel it should be in a different forum, please move where appropriate. Thanks!

I work in the business world for a very large conservative corporation that praises themselves as a corporation that is very diverse. Recently, one of my team members left her position, moving on to a better opportunity. I contacted our talent management team to open up a position req to back-fill the person that left my team. This is where it gets good....

As I'm speaking with the talent management recruiter, reviewing all the detailed requirements for the position I need filled, she begins to tell me that we need to fill the position with a more diverse candidate. So, I begin to tell her the diversity make-up of my team.

My team consists of:

6 white women in their 50's
2 white males in their 50's
1 Indian male in his early 30's
2 Black males in their early 40's
1 black female in her 40's
1 Indian female in her late 20's
1 Asian female in her 40's.


A pretty diverse team in my opinion.

So, I asked the talent management recruiter if she could provide more detail into her definition of a diverse candidate? Now, let's backup a second for a little team background; My team is a Compliance and Regulatory team working on a legacy mainframe environment using mostly COBOL. It's an environment that's over 30+ years old. The talent management recruiter knows this and fully understands what type of people I need on the team and what the market has in filling the role as I have worked with this recruiter many times.

Back to the conversation of me asking for the recruiter's definition of a diverse candidate; As I ask her what is meant by a diverse candidate she tells me my open role should be filled by a woman of Indian descent only. Now, this is were my brain goes from zero to 100 and I say, that's discrimination. She tells me no, its diversity hence the title of this thread.

Now, for those out there that understand the environment I'm working with, the odds of me finding an Indian woman, the knows how write code in COBOL on a legacy mainframe environment is next to impossible. I will have been odds finding a landed UFO because most Indian women the write code are Java or .Net developers.

Anyway, with that said, I tell the recruiter that's an impossible task, but I will try. So 2 weeks go by and only 1 Indian male and 1 Indian female apply for the open role and both of them had zero knowledge of the mainframe environment. I also had 2 older white males and 5 older white females apply. After interviewing them I picked the best candidate and offered one of the older females the position because they were best qualified. The recruiter tells me again, we are not accepting white candidates because we are driving diversity. If we don't pick a diverse candidate, we have to provide documentation with proof stating why the position wasn't filled with a diverse candidate. The recruiter then tells me to pick one of the Indian candidates. I tell her no, they are not qualified and I hired one of the older white females and called it a day.

But to my point, when does diversity because discrimination? I totally felt the policies of our human resources department are discriminating against others that are not of Indian decent.

I would love to know what other ATSers think, whether you agree with how I felt or not and why?

Thanks,
Knight

At what point were you tempted to tell your HR person to get off her lazy butt and do the paperwork so you could have a qualified candidate over the Indian candidate who knew nothing about what the position required?

And you also wonder at what point the HR lady was about to tell you to train the Indian candidate from scratch in things she had no knowledge of just to avoid having to fill out that paperwork?

a reply to: KnightFire


You don't work for a Conservative Corporation!!! You work for a corporation who bows down to Political Correctness and Cultural Marxism.


Well, in this day and age, the lines are blurred, but I will stand by my first statement. I believe in Meritocracy, which is hiring the person MOST qualified for the job regardless of race/gender.

a reply to: seeker1963

To be fair, wasn't the Obama Dept. of Labor considering making it a requirement that employers had to justify non-diverse hires?

I never heard if that went through or not as a regulation.

a reply to: KnightFire


Diversity is always discrimination or at least when it is required diversity.

And one thing I have noticed. Every time I see somebody in charge of diversity at a school or business, they are never white males. Not very diverse.

originally posted by: KnightFire
So this thread is sort of a rant, but it has political value from the business world perspective. That's why I have added it to the Political Madness forum. Mods if you feel it should be in a different forum, please move where appropriate. Thanks!

I work in the business world for a very large conservative corporation that praises themselves as a corporation that is very diverse. Recently, one of my team members left her position, moving on to a better opportunity. I contacted our talent management team to open up a position req to back-fill the person that left my team. This is where it gets good....

As I'm speaking with the talent management recruiter, reviewing all the detailed requirements for the position I need filled, she begins to tell me that we need to fill the position with a more diverse candidate. So, I begin to tell her the diversity make-up of my team.

My team consists of:

6 white women in their 50's
2 white males in their 50's
1 Indian male in his early 30's
2 Black males in their early 40's
1 black female in her 40's
1 Indian female in her late 20's
1 Asian female in her 40's.


A pretty diverse team in my opinion.

So, I asked the talent management recruiter if she could provide more detail into her definition of a diverse candidate? Now, let's backup a second for a little team background; My team is a Compliance and Regulatory team working on a legacy mainframe environment using mostly COBOL. It's an environment that's over 30+ years old. The talent management recruiter knows this and fully understands what type of people I need on the team and what the market has in filling the role as I have worked with this recruiter many times.

Back to the conversation of me asking for the recruiter's definition of a diverse candidate; As I ask her what is meant by a diverse candidate she tells me my open role should be filled by a woman of Indian descent only. Now, this is were my brain goes from zero to 100 and I say, that's discrimination. She tells me no, its diversity hence the title of this thread.

Now, for those out there that understand the environment I'm working with, the odds of me finding an Indian woman, the knows how write code in COBOL on a legacy mainframe environment is next to impossible. I will have been odds finding a landed UFO because most Indian women the write code are Java or .Net developers.

Anyway, with that said, I tell the recruiter that's an impossible task, but I will try. So 2 weeks go by and only 1 Indian male and 1 Indian female apply for the open role and both of them had zero knowledge of the mainframe environment. I also had 2 older white males and 5 older white females apply. After interviewing them I picked the best candidate and offered one of the older females the position because they were best qualified. The recruiter tells me again, we are not accepting white candidates because we are driving diversity. If we don't pick a diverse candidate, we have to provide documentation with proof stating why the position wasn't filled with a diverse candidate. The recruiter then tells me to pick one of the Indian candidates. I tell her no, they are not qualified and I hired one of the older white females and called it a day.

But to my point, when does diversity because discrimination? I totally felt the policies of our human resources department are discriminating against others that are not of Indian decent.

I would love to know what other ATSers think, whether you agree with how I felt or not and why?

Thanks,
Knight

Your team sounds pretty diverse. I've worked at some lily white companies in the past and I do think companies need to make more of an effort to get out of their comfort zone when it comes to hiring, but that does not mean hiring unqualified candidates.

A lot of times, government mandates drive a lot of these decisions, not common sense. HR may be thinking they may run into some issues with government for not being diverse enough...

Is the HR person an Indian Female? If not, then perhaps her job should be the one needing to be diversified? I am sure the skills needed for that job are more than possible for that diverse of a candidate.

I wonder how the HR person would have felt had you recommended that option to satisfy the diversity requirement?

That’s insane. I’m a commercial construction contractor and on most state jobs we have to provide a certain dollar amount of diversity participation through either material supply or labor. We usually go the material supply route(because finding a EDGE qualified sub contractor that will provide halfway decent laborers is impossible) where we send our invoices through a EDGE certified company who then sends the invoice to our regular supplier.
There are many minority companies that do this type of thing and all they do is act as a pass through. The system pretty much teaches them that they will get work as long as they are a minority. It’s completely ridiculous.

Box ticking.

I hate the modern world.

I keep thinking I will wake up and it will all have been a bad dream.

a reply to: KnightFire

It's always discrimination. As your example points out, hiring people due to their racial and ethnic characteristics is no different than not hiring people for their racial and ethnic characteristics. It's discrimination, racism, and entirely unjust.

if you were actively rejecting people based on ethnicity, religion, gender, sex or whatever that's when questions would be asked.
the warbled wonky right wing rhetoric that you have to hire a massively under qualified hispanic transgender named muhammad for some quota is just that, warbled wonky right wing rhetoric.

a reply to: KnightFire

Perhaps you could have your white female candidate "identify" as someone of Indian descent?

Not wanting to suggest your story is not entirely accurate, but have never heard of a HR department specifying the race and gender of a position that be filled when there is no connection to the role.

Here in the UK it would be illegal.

a reply to: KnightFire

In my experience, white people hire white people. Indians hire Indians. Chinese hire Chinese people. There's lot of racism to go around.

a reply to: cinerama

What do you think "background checks" are all about.

a reply to: KnightFire

It's all horsecrap. Corporations and businesses aren't in business to make political warm fuzzies a reality. They are in business to make money, period. They also carry 100% of the risk, meaning there should be no laws, mandates, tax breaks, or requirements forcing or even coercing them into making any hires whatsoever that are based on any metric other than qualifications and what's best for their personal business. And yes, I realize that "OMG, Jim Crow era, yadda, yadda..." too flipping bad, the world sucked in the past for some. In today's world, *most* businesses would suffer if they were openly racist in their staffing practices. Those that wouldn't suffer are likely in some sort of position where it is financially advantageous for them to hire people of a particular ethnicity, and frankly I see nothing wrong with that at all if it is the owner's best judgement and his company's assets and risks are on the line.

We need freedom from regulations in this country, not more red tape.

a reply to: KnightFire

How do you know the HR women is just not on a crusade to get more women in IT and it has nothing to do with company policy?

originally posted by: burdman30ott6
We need freedom from regulations in this country, not more red tape.

We need better wages so the politicians in this country take the middle class seriously. Money talks and the cabal of billionaires are the only ones represented in government.

The dirty little secret is that if you set quotas to make sure you don't look discriminatory in your hiring practices you will still end up truthfully discriminatory in your hiring practices.

On the first hand, you may not actually be discriminating at all, but may have hired the best qualified candidates even if you did end up with a workroom full of pygmy cannibals who have green spots and it looks like you discriminated against yellow bellied yahoos.

But when you make sure you are going to hire at least a few yellow bellied yahoos and set rules that your workroom must contain new fewer than three, that's when you actively end up turning away qualified applicants for the signature crime of being pygmy cannibals with green spots instead of yellow bellied yahoos, meaning you have actively discriminated against them for who and what they are and no other reason.

a reply to: KnightFire

I work in the business world for a very large conservative corporation that praises themselves as a corporation that is very diverse.

That caught my eye in your post. A "conservative" business would put the interests of the business first and hire the most qualified. That kind of discrimination, which by the way is technically illegal in the US, is what you would expect from a liberal minded company. Not judging either way, but that is just how it is. If that's policy, it's a hidden policy, which I suppose is not all that unusual. Is the company large enough to fall under federal laws?

I'm curious, why would you call a company with policies like that "conservative"? Are you saying they are pretending to be the opposite for cover?

Yes your team is so diverse that no sane person would ever question it's makeup. You sure your not dealing with person who is acting on their own, based on their own bias and perhaps it has nothing to do with company policy?

Is this talent management recruiter perhaps young and fresh out of college?