Sometimes having the things you know instinctively, or from casual observation, confirmed by expert studies is downright depressing.
I noticed it while growing up, fought it over my 25 years headhunting, wrote and article about it in 1999 called Hiring in Your Comfort Zone, and blogged about it last March in People like me.
Studies looking at its origins and insidiousness were reported Monday by Shankar Vedantam.
“It” is homophily, it’s been around forever, it’s an attitude I personally dislike and it keeps getting worse.
“Smith-Lovin’s research, for example, shows that homophily is on the rise in the United States on nearly every dimension of social identity. Ever larger numbers of people seem to be sealing themselves off in worlds where everyone thinks the way they do.”
As deplorable as this is from the social science perspective, it can be the kiss of a very slow death for companies.
Managers who, unconsciously or not, hire in their own image, no matter how they define that, do their employers harm.
A workforce that homogenizes along any lines is a workforce that will either miss, ignore, or be unable to reach a part of their market.