The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

This is so depressing. This is the sort of DEI effort that gives the rest a bad name.

It should never, ever be about hard quotas.

It absolutely should be about using some contextual information (factoring the person's school environment in) and challenging assumptions about stereotypes so that you are not deciding who is best on assumptions but on evidence.

> It should never, ever be about hard quotas.

And yet, it is.

The success of a DEI program is the number of people who are in X category.

A homogeneous company is a DEI failure, no?

Ish. Yes, if everyone in your company (of a significant size) is the same, then that is a fail.

However, the solution is not to force people into roles they are unqualified for. It's to find the ways to make the role more attractive to different demographics.

And it's not going to apply in all cases. Would you apply it to NBA teams?

Honestly, quotas would probably have been better than what was done here. Inventing a test (or 'questionnaire' as it was called here) where the goal was to filter out almost everyone who did not have the answer key, then only giving that answer key to the preferred race is just such a terrible way to do it.

I'll counter this with my experience.

I was a technology consultant to the HR department at a large tech company. They were bringing in some new technologies for recruiting and hiring. Their main objective as to make sure they could post their job openings to affinity outlets frequented by candidates across various backgrounds, places of origin, and racial communities.

It's akin to saying "I want to hire new college graduates, so I'll post a job opening to a job board targeting new college graduates".

Beyond that I was not aware of any quotas that were built into their assessment funnels. On that premise alone, I think the DEI initiative was addressing a reasonable objective.

“Such a terrible way to do it” is a huge understatement.

It is so beyond egregious it should be criminal. And that’s no hyperbole.

"This is the sort of DEI effort that gives the rest a bad name."

I'd be interested to read about a DEI effort that gives the rest a good name.

The "Women in Engineering" group where I worked was instrumental in retaining multiple good engineers who would've definitely left otherwise after some gendered issues (asked out by coworkers, asked whether they were an engineer in meetings, etc). I was a mentor for early career engineers and I had a woman talking about leaving but the woman in engineering group at work helped her immensely and she's a top performer.

Systems affect different people differently (which is blindingly obvious but bears repeating) so if you want a meritocracy based on actual ability you need to do your best to nurture all people with ability, which isn't a one size fits all approach. I knew multiple people who absolutely kicked ass that benefitted from targeted programs (and from their success we've all benefited from these programs), there's just also a lot of dumb shit out there for DEI, too.

its actually a personality test, that ideally should be designed to be well-suited to filter out personality types that tend to be successful at the job.

The scandal was coaching people how to pass the personality test. That's just a waste. You end up getting people who are a bad fit for the job, and will ultimately not be successful long-term

For instance, I will ace any aptitude test at 99.9%+ percentile easily (I always do at any standardized test, SAT, GRE, MCAT etc). Yet I would be a terrible terrible fit for ATC. The level of detail-orientedness it needs day to day for me would be a challenge. I can do it for short periods of time of absolute concentration, but my god, there is no way I would last at the job long-term. Training me would have been a waste of scarce resources. But I know several people that such tasks energize them and may not score as high on the aptitude test, but would be a better fit for that job long-term

If done well, including personality test could have been a good way to produce better outcomes, and increase the early part of the pipelines by opening it up to more people than just CTI grads.

this is what at the core of DEI. Correct!

Far too many people believe in the myth of pure meritocracy. Instead, what most people really see as meritocracy is actually just something reinforces built-in un-meritocratic advantages.

For real meritocracy, the best approach is to nurture all people with ability, not just device some "test" of meritocracy and demand that fidelity to that test result is the answer.

Blind auditions in orchestras, efforts to get women into sciences are all great examples.

You expand your pipeline into places where you were not previously looking. Go recruit at a historically black college, or a Women Who Code convention. You don’t need to lower standards.

The talent is out there. If you’re not even looking in the right places, that’s the first place to start.

Personality tests being useful makes sense, but personality tests where candidates are sparse and the training/hiring bottleneck has already been passed by candidates is terrible.

Also, I have a very hard time believing these "correct" answers are representative of the already hired candidates. Worst subject in school was science, worst in college was history, and participated in four or more high school sports, but no correlation on whether they believe it is important to be fast or accurate in their work? Applied to five or six jobs in the last three years? Is bothered "more than most" by criticism from others? [1] I almost find it easier to believe that they were blatantly playing into negative stereotypes of certain minority demographics than that this survey was fit to describe already hired ATCs.

[1] https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/

As the article itself describes, programs that expose kids to fields they might otherwise not have a chance to interact with. A field trip for kids that focuses on creating more people in the future who are interested in the field from more diverse background.

Require diversity in the interview pool, not when making hiring decisions.

e.g. in a male majority profession, for every two male applicants selected to interview, select at least one female applicant. But once the candidate pool is established, pick the best available candidate for the job.

How long does the checklist need to be? Can I check three boxes if I an interview a gay black jew or do I only get one?

Another example is to make your recruiting contextual. How would you rate two candidate - one that grew up dirt poor and when to the worst public schools but gets 90% on your test, vs one that went to the best private schools and got 95%?

You can also do things to remove stereotypes about your industry - "I'm not going to work in industry X because it's all posh people."

The switchup of 'worst' subject in high school to college seems so striking to me. At best, I could see it coming from an over-fitting of data. At worst, it was a test designed intentionally to fail anyone without the answer key. Not even 'playing in to stereotypes', but 'what combination of answers did no one choose, so we can block everyone?'

For those that did, good.

They didn't seem to have good publicists...