The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

There's a simple fix to removing discrimination in hiring practices that no one seems to notice. Remove all demographic questions from the application. Hide the name and gender and attach a applicant ID. It's as easy as that. Every job should be looking for the most qualified individual regardless of race, nationality, religion, and sex. Demographics in the application are a recipe for disaster on both sides of the isle.

My company's DEI program effectively does this. The main tenets are:

- Cast a wide recruiting net to attract a diverse candidate pool

- Don't collect demographic data on applications

- Separate the recruiting / interview process from the hiring committee

- The hiring committee only sees qualifications and interview results; all identifying info is stripped

- Our guardrail is the assumption that our hiring process is blind, and our workforce demographics should closely mirror general population demographics as a result

- If our demographics start to diverge, we re-eval our process to look for bias or see if we can do better at recruiting

The separation allows candidates to request special accommodations from the interview team if needed, without that being a factor to the committee making the final decision.

Overall, our workforce is much more skilled and diverse than anywhere else I've worked.