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.

> 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

These are not good assumptions. 80% of pediatricians are women. Why would a hospital expect to hire 50% male pediatricians when only 20% of pediatricians are men? If you saw a hospital that had 50% male pediatricians, that means they're hiring male pediatricians at 4x the rate of women. That's pretty strong evidence that female candidates aren't being given equal employment opportunity.

A past company of mine had practices similar to yours. The way it achieved gender diversity representative of the general population in engineering roles (which were only ~20% women in the field) was by advancing women to interviews at rates much higher than men. The hiring committee didn't see candidates' demographics so this went unknown for quite some time. But the recruiters choosing which candidates to advance to interviewing did, and they used tools like census data on the gender distribution of names to ensure the desired distribution of candidates were interviewed. When the recruiters onboarding docs detailing all those demographic tools were leaked it caused a big kerfuffle, and demands for more transparency in the hiring pipeline.

I'd be very interested in what the demographic distribution of your applicants are, and how they compare against the candidates advanced to interviews.

Yea when I have done hiring the vast majority of applicants were of specific races and demographics. It isn’t a private companies’ job to skew hiring outcomes away from the demographics of the incoming pool of qualified applicants. If you have 95% female applicants for a position I would expect that roughly 95% of hires are going to be female and vice versa.

I think it is damaging when hiring outcomes are skewed as well as it undermines the credibility of those who got hired under easier conditions fabricated by the company.

I too agree with the grandparent post that we should try to be scrubbing PII from applications as much as possible. I do code interviews at BIGCO and for some reason recruiting sends me the applicants resume which is totally irrelevant to the code interview and offers more opportunities for biases to slip in (i.e this person went to MIT vs this person went to no name community college).

> If you have 95% female applicants for a position I would expect that roughly 95% of hires are going to be female and vice versa.

I would disagree for the most part. As mentioned above, there are roles where you'll see gender bias that may not be addressable. In the OB/GYN example, I understand some women would only be comfortable with a doctor that is also a woman. That's not necessarily addressable by shoe-horning in male doctors. But again, that can be accounted for in DEI programs.

It's also more understandable to non-remote jobs. Some areas have staggeringly different demographics that could only really be changed by relocating candidates, which isn't feasible for all business. Mentioning this specifically as my company is fully remote.

Otherwise, in my opinion, a candidate pool that is 95% some demographic shows a severe deficiency in the ability to attract candidates.