Ask HN: How does your company approach hiring diversity?

Where I work, we just hire the best applicants for the job. As it happens, at least in the dev side of things, the workforce is approximately equal in diversity with the community we're in. The same was true with my previous employer as well.

>Our company has been tracking diversity and reports on "# of non-male identifying employees" and "# of non-white employees".

You don't think this is kind of disgusting?

So at least in NYC, once you've hit 100ish employees you're required to track diversity to some rough extent (I'm not sure if this is federal, state or local law). One thing that my company has done is to specifically engage with focused diversity groups for hiring (ie one of the bootcamps we hire engineers from is women-only. Other examples is posting new jobs to local veteran group). It's a little weird at first to specifically engage like this, but a better way is to think about how many companies do college recruiting. Often they'll send recruiters to Ivy League universities, which are not diverse in any real sense. While you can continue to do that, you're balancing it out by specifically reaching out to another more diverse source. They all have to hit the same hiring bar, but your pool of candidates is more diverse

They require a "diversity statement" for many positions. Presumably that screens out a lot of ideological diversity.

Hard to say whether it has much effect on the diversity I assume you mean, as this place has about the same race/gender/etc composition it would have 30 years ago, IMO. It's certainly easier to be "out" than it was back then, which I'm very happy about.

But not in a viewpoint sense, which I'm not so happy about. I kind of miss being able to talk openly with my freaky hard-left, hard-right, and generally nutty colleagues. Everyone's gone quiet.

This looks illegal afaik, I remember reading that posting job offers to target protected classes (e.g. posting in a men's magazine, restricting facebook ads to men) is illegal

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45569227

It is simply not a factor. We don't discriminate, but we will hire anyone who is willing and able to do the job for the salary offered. We don't track any diversity metrics, and the gender or ethnicity of a candidate does not enter into the hiring equation at all.

I do not hire anyone, but I can mention what is my opinions of it.

They shouldn't care "# of non-male identifying employees" and "# of non-white employees" (except perhaps acting in a movie, and maybe some other kind of jobs (but not computer programming), then it might matter if you are non-male or non-white or non-tall or whatever; which details is more important depend what your job is).

You should hire whoever is qualify for the job, whether they are male/female, white/black, etc. Have the equal opportunity; don't force the diversity. Anyways, just having many people (even if they are all white or none white) is still having diversity because you have many different people with different ideas/experiences; they even mentioned this on the CBC radio. (Diversity of ideas is more important, I think.) But you should not prevent having non-white and non-male and so on either; if they are good at the job then they should have this job, whether they are male or not.

In a construction work there might be more men than women because on average, men has more physical strength, but, nevertheless they should hire anyone who is capable and willing to do the job, regardless of man/woman. So, in the case of contsruction working it might be "naturally" biased, but, does not mean you should either enforce equality of men/women nor refuse to hire women.

Woof, these comments. These are pretty standard tactics for increasing diversity. The idea is you want to expend energy filling your outbound pipeline with diverse candidates because your inbound pipeline will naturally fill up with the status quo.

You don't lower the bar at all or discriminate against anyone, as many people in this thread are assuming, the key is just bringing in enough people that you find someone who meets the bar from an underrepresented group.

Do you think a person who happens to be a minority is more likely going to be happy that they got hired for their skills, or for their skin color/gender? How would you feel if you got hired for something other than your skills for the job? Literally everyone loses with diversity hiring. Logic be damned though, right?

I'm a "diverse" white male and I hate it way way more when I'm considered less valuable due to my appearance only to be considered useful to HR again because I check one of their quota checkboxes... Then if there was no discrimination to begin with. Commodifying identity is so gross it makes want to puke.

Realise a lot of the roadblocks are going to be things like office culture, language barriers, the lack of appeal of being a minority among a majority (ESPECIALLY if the majority is being discriminated against by HR)

Maybe encourage internal hires to recommend and mentor people similar to themselves? If your workplace is located in a "diverse" area than hire locally? Nepotism is less degrading than being subject to institutional discrimination at the hands of the resident HR bigot.

Here's a different approach. I'll refer to women as the "diverse" group but this should vaguely apply to other categories like race or sexual orientation. I'm male, and I'm writing as if you're male, but you don't actually say and this advice might either be unnecessary or irrelevant if you're not, so please make allowances as appropriate.

Make sure that no one at your organization is creating a hostile environment toward women. The hostile environment may be invisible to you, and you might not find out unless a woman trusts you and tells you. Text analysis editing whatever tools on your job ads are pointless if your existing female employees are leaving because of this. Conversely, if you have a lot of women already, it will be easier to hire more because they will recommend their female friends, and female applicants will see women there and may feel more comfortable.

Make sure you have female management, ideally as executives with real power. That way current and prospective female employees have some basic assurance that the environment won't be totally hostile and that gender-related complaints might be taken seriously.

Here's what you can personally do:

* Publicly advocate for policies that make it easier for women to exist in your workplace. This does not mean making it hostile for men. There's the obvious stuff like making sure no one has an inappropriately sexy screensaver, but also: if your company has t-shirts, are there any with a female cut? are female bathrooms as accessible and clean as male bathrooms? does your company make no-questions-asked allowances for primary caregivers of children, often women?

* Make an effort to be trusted by your female colleagues as someone they can complain about gender bias to. You can do this by publicly advocating for policies that support women and by working toward some gender parity in hiring like you're doing here. Then, ask these women how things are really going. Be prepared to be unpleasantly surprised, but definitely do not disbelieve them as your first reaction.

* If your executive team is mostly men, figure out if that can be changed in the near future. Maybe that team is growing too, and you can encourage them not to instantly hire one of their close male friends. If the executive team is heavily male and that can't be changed quickly, then encourage the executive team to be aggressively outspoken about avoiding gender bias.

I hope this helps.

>Our company has been tracking diversity and reports on "# of non-male identifying employees" and "# of non-white employees".

Are you sure? This kind of sounds illegal...

How to get rich quick:

1. Find a company who has senior exec with title of "Diversity Officer" or similar.

2. Apply(1)

(1) If you're: black + female + lesbian = jackpot. If you're: white + young + male + straight = tough luck. Move on.

PS: I am working with the person who was hired to "fill diversity gap".

Don't get me started.

I agree with hiring based on skills not non-capability metrics. I also believe that a diverse team is valuable (and interesting to me).

However one topic that isn’t discussed much in the comments is how one advertises the position. It’s easy to end up advertising (subconsciously) in a way that attracts more of the current majority rather than a diverse applicant pool. For example, most of the team are “bros” and the job description caters to “bros”, then guess who’s more likely to apply for the job? In many cases you’ll miss the best merit based candidate because they are not a “bro” and don’t want to work there.

So I do feel it’s important to make job offerings as inclusive as possible. And that sometimes requires non trivial effort.

(Replace “bro” with any group of your choice.)

The benefits of diversity are that you get a diverse set of experiences and opinions hoping it will lead to better problem solving. The part where many companies go horribly wrong is assuming that diverse experiences are proportional to how diverse their gender pool is or how many different skin colors there are in the office. That's a lazy way of hiring. Hiring someone to fulfill a skin color quota or gender quota is like saying "Hey, you are just like everyone else who tried to apply BUT you are a black woman. So go over here to your desk and be the token black woman of the office."

That is essentially what a company is doing when they try and fullfil some race/gender quotas.