The Wall Street Journal published an interesting and troubling letter yesterday under the heading, “Diversity Can Conflict With Quality Hiring.” [HatTip to a professor in a major university science department who, for reasons related to “diversity,” prefers to remain anonymous.]
At first it wasn’t clear what the author’s complaint had to do with diversity, since his target was the increasing corporate focus on credentials as opposed to skills.
Credential verification is certainly easier than skill verification. In fact, skill verification is intentionally made difficult. As a senior technical staff member I have been previously criticized by the human-resources department for asking technical questions during interviews of the flavor, “Please describe for me how you would approach solving or setting up the following type of engineering problem.” Similarly, questions like, “Given the following observations of a particular process, what do you think is causing that?” were off limits. In other words, delving into a candidate’s critical thinking skills was frowned upon.
HR exists to keep the company out of legal hot water and these well-meaning folks are totally without skills related to the core competencies of what we do. While a previous supervisor would be a trove of useful information about a candidate’s skill set, lawyers have ensured that checking with references, except to verify previous job title and salary, is forbidden.
If the policies and practices described here have become common corporate practice, then we’re in even worse shape than I thought. Although I have often been accused of thinking that every problem we face is the result of our abandoning the principle of colorblind equality (a charge, I might add, that is only partially true…), on reading this far in the letter I failed to see the connection to diversity.
It came in the next, and final, paragraph:
All U.S. corporations are under intense diversity pressure in the hiring process. Credentials are easier to acquire than are skills, and thus quickly expand the available diversity pool to meet politically mandated diversity quotas. I know professors at major universities who were told point blank by recruiters that unless they quickly increased the diversity of their candidate pool, the recruiters would stop recruiting there. Quality is irrelevant in the face of diversity.
Whether or not quality is “irrelevant,” it is surely compromised at every step up the ladder — college admissions, graduate and professional school admissions, university and corporate hiring and promotion — where officially “diverse” candidates are held to lower standards than others.
One can argue, as many otherwise reasonable people do, that the benefit of racial preference policies outweighs their cost, but one can’t reasonably deny that one of its most expensive costs is securing negative stereotypes of the “diverse” more firmly in place. Considering the unintended but entirely predictable and clear effects of this liberal attempt to ameliorate injustice, I am reminded all too often, as I wrote here,
of a powerful scene in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man in which the narrator, observing a statue on the campus of Tuskegee Institute depicting Booker T. Washington ostensibly lifting the veil of ignorance from the brow of a former slave, wonders whether instead he might unintentionally be securing it firmly in place.
