Diversity Hiring Practices

¶ … journal that relates to equal employment opportunity. The article reviewed for this report covers the subject of employment interviews as conducted and participated in by black and white prospective employees and employer representatives. The crux of the report is that when dealing with either identity-blind or identity-conscious interview structures, a stigmatizing can occur that is not illegal but is still intimidating and hurtful to the overall process.

While good intentions regarding race and hiring practices are good, focusing too much or improperly on race or other personal traits not mundane to the job can actually hurt the process and/or people involved. The article starts out by stating that employers use one of two general tactics when it comes to hiring of protected classes and/or diversity candidates.

Indeed, the United States has a long and storied history of racial and ethnic challenges with the more poignant examples being that of slavery and the need for civil rights advancements even a century or more after slavery was abolished in the United States in the 1860's. In the modern context, human resources personnel use one of two major tactics, those being identity-blind policies or identity-conscious.

While legal precedent and procedure is far from settled, the article dives home that there are reasons to do either but both are controversial in their own way. Identity-blind policies and procedures have the goal of ignoring and disregarding race as a reason to hire or not hire someone because doing so in any context misses the point of the civil rights movement and the general idea of treating every applicant equally regardless of race.

However, others assert that the years of maltreatment and punitive measures, both institutional and social, call for a remedy that involves singling out minority candidates or hire so as to level the playing field that was sent askew by the first century or two of America's existence. As far as ostensibly identity-blind approaches, the active self-suppression of race-oriented thinking and questions can actually lead to a degradation in the interview quality and can sometimes have an effect that is opposite of what is intended.

Even when race is an accepted factor (e.g. diversity hires) in hiring decisions, a lack of structure and focus can be detrimental to the hiring process. Indeed, some people associate stereotypical racial behaviors with being "unprofessional" and this usually leads to blacks being stigmatized in the workplace, to less promotions and/or raises and to less hiring of minority candidates in general (Madera & Hebl, 2013).

The article does a fairly good job of looking at the different perspectives but there is one potential fatal flaw that is a little concerning. The article is not nearly emphatic enough when positing whether suppression of bias is a standard activity that all hiring managers and human resources personnel must deal with or if it is just something that only under-educated and more ignorant managers/HR staff would deal with.

Along the same vein of thought, to suggest that prejudice between blacks is a one-way street would be a fallacy to put it lightly.

While much of any animosity from blacks would have its genesis in historical accounts, anecdotes from older family members and personal experience, to suggest that all of these accounts were even perceived correctly and/or that all white people, HR staff or not, have a bias against black people is a premise that the author of this report would reject but the article in question for this report does not seem to do that.

Indeed, much of the world around us and how we feel about it is based more on perception than reality. However, while those perceptions may be right in at least some instances, there is good reason to believe that they would be inaccurate a lot of the time and there is often no way to know for sure in many to most situations (Madera & Hebl, 2013).

The author of this report would not disagree for a second that having no structure in an interview whilst also toiling with being very careful about not issuing race-oriented comments or questions during an interview is a concern. However, perhaps it stems from fear of litigation and/or offending the minority candidate being assessed.

The reason for this is that the employment world, and other areas of society on top of this, are very litigious and people often look for reasons to be offended and/or to blame their misfortunes on situations and premises that are simply not accurate or at least not provable. Perhaps a better question these researchers should ask and ponder is whether race-conscious hiring practices are ethical or not.

Meaning, it should be asked whether the focus on minority hires should be a way to right prior wrongs or if it is something that occurs at the expense of white candidates that did nothing to create the conditions and problems in society both past and present (Madera & Hebl, 2013).

The article is useful in that it compares and contrasts the same general question using identity-conscious and identity-blind hiring practices but it greatly dodges the elephant in the room or whether either or both of those can be problematic for reasons other than simple racial/social bias, which seems to be the only prism being looked at.

The author of this report would assert that the paradigm being reviewed is much more complex and much more intricate that prejudice alone and the legal morass that has been created is at least in part due to people stirring the pot and fabricating charges or at least from misperceptions about the feelings and intentions of the people involved (Madera & Hebl, 2013). The applicability to the course content in the class for which this report is being completed is quite obvious.

One of the major specters and conditions that can and must be dealt with by any human resources department is to make sure that protected classes of current and/or potential workers are not punished intentionally or.