Ensuring Equality in Hiring and Promotions
Is using race or gender acceptable when hiring or promoting someone?
I worked for a company at one point that had been sued for racial discrimination in a very high profile case. The result was that they instituted an extremely disciplined zero tolerance approach to any sort of discrimination and also committed to achieving both racial and gender quotas.
It went so far as the caucasion employees were told flat out that they would not receive any promotions until the quotas had been achieved, regardless of who was the most qualified candidate.
Needless to say, this strategy backfired for two critical reasons.
One, making a statement like that essentially constitutes discrimination; two, not hiring the best qualified employee, especially when the promotions were in critical positions, hurt the company and customers suffered as a result.
So, hiring or promoting solely based on gender or race did not work, the answer at this point to hiring based on either of these would be no, because being the most qualified employee was not the essential component or a new hire or promotion that it should have been.
However, it's in the proper solution to this that the answer technically changes to yes.
The answer to this wasn't to quit on quotas or to go back to other discriminatory practices, the answer was to ensure that the person hired or the person promoted was always the most qualified and the "right" person for the job; and the company simply deepened their search resources in HR and developed their training programs so that well qualified minorities were always among the finalists for promotions.
HR changed their practices and went through services dedicated to finding the most qualified females or minorities, to help ensure that when hiring their were always qualified candidates available that would not lower the corporate standards and ensure that customers' needs were being met.
Meanwhile, a comprehensive training program, started at the HR level, was established to identify all employees career objectives and paths, and then based on each employee's personal goals they were given mentors and and action plans were established to help each employee achieve what they sought out of their career.
By the combination of those two practices, the company was able to achieve its quotas for both racial and gender with their external search practices; and then with a comprehensive career path for each employee along with a sound action plan to meet their goals, the company was able to train all members of all gender and race to reach their potential and eliminate discrimination as an issue entirely, which always should have been the correct answer to the problem.
