Is hiring just to meet diversity quotas an unfair approach?
Companies are making a big mistake. Many recruiters in India are nudging their human resource (HR) teams to show a preference for hiring women at the junior-most levels, be it candidates looking for jobs on college campuses or those with barely a few months of work experience. This is a quick-fix hiring bias that will not help a company meet its gender-diversity target in the long run.
And there is a good chance that in its attempt to fulfil a certain diversity quota, more suitable candidates who do not meet the gender criterion may get rejected. “In one of the leading global IT firms, there is a lot of push to hire women, and sometimes in teams, about 60-70% are women. But move up the ladder, and not even 25% remain.
The company failed to retain most of them because of its hiring bias in the initial stages," observes an HR head at an IT company in India. Consider what Abhijit Bhaduri, talent management advisor and executive coach, has to say as he calls out biases that come into play in base-level recruitment, when resumes reveal nothing about the competence of candidates for work roles, but only school, college, city, gender and other such details. “Often, the language in job advertisements [has] an inherent bias towards—or against—one gender or group," says Bhaduri.
Artificial intelligence (AI) tools used in recruitment promise to eliminate biases, but then again, AI needs human oversight in most cases of early adoption. In any case, companies must invest in training their managers responsible for hiring to check these biases. Crucially, the data that trains AI engines also needs to be periodically checked for biases that may keep a group out of the consideration set.
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