Affirmative Action and Diversity Recruiting a la Recruiting Animal #discrimination

I like the Recruiting Animal.  A lot of people find him offensive but he brings out real issues and doesn’t let you hide behind rhetoric.  You can hear his show on Wednesdays.

Here’s something he wrote on Facebook earlier this month (I’m posting with his permission):

Yesterday, on The Recruiting Animal Show my guest was Chris Fields.

He wrote a blog posting in which he declared: “We all know that diversity helps make everything better.”

I challenged him on this. How is a Greek programmer better than an Italian programmer? How is a woman programmer better than a man?

What about a Dutch accountant? Better than a Russian accountant?

He hadn’t thought the issue through and all he could say was, “The teams I’ve worked on have always been better when they were diverse. I don’t want to work on a team full of me.”

But, in fact, he also said that people are naturally attracted to people like themselves. That’s why every minority needs affirmative action.

Because most of the hiring managers are going to be from the majority population and they are naturally going to favour people like themselves. Inotherwords, everyone in the world is, by nature, averse to diversity.

So, if people like people like themselves, how can teams be better when they are diverse? Chris didn’t tell us that either. He wants to come back on the show. And maybe he’ll have answers then.

When Ed Newman was a guest (here’s a less-than-three-minute clip), he said that diversity programs are just to prevent the standard bias in hiring. But they don’t promote innovation through the hiring of diverse thinkers.

There are a lot of things to hate about affirmative action, whether you are a minority or not.

It is an ingrained part of HR and hiring… so for now, how do you get around any decisions based on discriminatory hiring and focus on talents, skills, deliverables, etc?