Recruiting Stupidity Stymies Diversity
by Miki Saxon
Of all the things I wondered about during the more than 20 years I spent as a tech recruiter was why companies used their most ignorant/untrained/naïve people in “first impression of the company” positions.
This was especially true when it came to hiring where ‘recruiter’ was the entry-level position in HR. It was where you served your time in order to get to the “real” jobs, such as benefits mgr, etc.
As you might guess, talking to a recruiter who couldn’t pronounce what you did, selected you by matching the words on the resume to the words on the job description, and had no glimmer of understanding about the position, wasn’t exactly encouraging to candidates. And the greenest of these recruiters were often the ones sent to handle college recruiting.
One would assume that this would have changed in the nearly 20 years since I left active recruiting. One would also assume that it had changed radically over the recent eight-plus year focus on gender diversity efforts.
One would be wrong.
College recruiters are worse; techincally knowledgable, but incredibally ignorant-to-downright-stupid when trying to engage candidates.
In 2012 and 2013, researchers attended 84 introductory sessions held by 66 companies at an elite West Coast university. (They never explicitly name Stanford, but …) Roughly a quarter of attendees at these one-hour sessions were women, on average. The researchers documented an unwelcoming environment for these women, including sexist jokes and imagery, geeky references, a competitive environment, and an absence of women engineers—all of which intimidated or alienated female recruits.
If you were a woman how interested would you be in those companies?
As a guy, would you want your daughter/sister/wife to work in that environment?
And, obviously, all this applies to the hiring of any under-represented demographic.
The researchers, Alison Wynn, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research, and Stanford sociology professor Shelley Correll, have shared their research with both recruiters and others inside the tech companies, with the (to me) expected reaction.
“They’re astonished. They often just don’t know what’s going on in their recruiting sessions.”
Astonishment and ignorance to what’s happening seem to be the standard reaction when anything within a standard process surfaces — recruiting is a process.
One solution is for companies to recognize that first impressions are the most lasting impressions people will have of them, whether they are candidates or customers, and choose/train their people accordingly.
However, if they don’t mirror that positive first impression in their culture, they probably shouldn’t bother in the first place.
Image credit: Tech Jobs Tour
