You bring up a very good point that the industry itself might be flawed.
The issue for me—and the reason I made my original statement—is that we can’t curtail human nature. By its nature, considering DEI aspects in hiring can potentially taint the criteria by which candidates are selected.
I’m not saying that cronyism and nepotism aren’t very real and serious issues across various industries and countries. However, DEI feels like a similar practice—just framed differently. It leads companies to hire a specific type of person for the wrong reasons rather than hiring the right person for the right reasons.
Moreover, in the U.S., only about 43% of the population is non-white. That means that, on any given job application, roughly 50% of the applicants are likely to be white. If a large business has an employee pool that is significantly more than 50% non-white, that suggests the industry is hiring with a specific demographic in mind—not based on merit, but based on ethnicity, appearance, or political beliefs. I think we can both agree that, in most industries, those factors should not be relevant.
nature. By its nature, considering DEI aspects in hiring can potentially taint the criteria by which candidates are selected.
Still an organizational problem if people are hired without regard to merit. In fact that’s the whole reason it’s worth having a DEI focus : you can’t just hire on demographics and it takes a bit more work to hire on merit while trying to reduce inequity.
If you see people hired solely on demographics, either your impression s wrong or the hiring manager sucks
You bring up a very good point that the industry itself might be flawed.
The issue for me—and the reason I made my original statement—is that we can’t curtail human nature. By its nature, considering DEI aspects in hiring can potentially taint the criteria by which candidates are selected.
I’m not saying that cronyism and nepotism aren’t very real and serious issues across various industries and countries. However, DEI feels like a similar practice—just framed differently. It leads companies to hire a specific type of person for the wrong reasons rather than hiring the right person for the right reasons.
Moreover, in the U.S., only about 43% of the population is non-white. That means that, on any given job application, roughly 50% of the applicants are likely to be white. If a large business has an employee pool that is significantly more than 50% non-white, that suggests the industry is hiring with a specific demographic in mind—not based on merit, but based on ethnicity, appearance, or political beliefs. I think we can both agree that, in most industries, those factors should not be relevant.
Still an organizational problem if people are hired without regard to merit. In fact that’s the whole reason it’s worth having a DEI focus : you can’t just hire on demographics and it takes a bit more work to hire on merit while trying to reduce inequity.
If you see people hired solely on demographics, either your impression s wrong or the hiring manager sucks