My experience is that if DEI hiring ends in a bad hire, that the organization at large was likely going to do a bad hire anyway. Some people might find it easier to blame DEI, but the truth is that your leadership sucks at your business. DEI is a scapegoat.
For example, people were jumping up and down at Boeing’s mission statement including DEI and pinning all their woes on that. Except the severe mistakes were made before that mission statement, and a more clear line can be drawn from how McDonnell Douglas leadership failed, got slurped up into Boeing, and ultimately somehow got to call the shots at Boeing.
Hollow, insincere self congratulation around DEI was a common feature of bad leadership, but it’s not the cause of the problems. Plenty of successful companies with solid hiring also have DEI initiatives without detriment.
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
My experience is that if DEI hiring ends in a bad hire, that the organization at large was likely going to do a bad hire anyway. Some people might find it easier to blame DEI, but the truth is that your leadership sucks at your business. DEI is a scapegoat.
For example, people were jumping up and down at Boeing’s mission statement including DEI and pinning all their woes on that. Except the severe mistakes were made before that mission statement, and a more clear line can be drawn from how McDonnell Douglas leadership failed, got slurped up into Boeing, and ultimately somehow got to call the shots at Boeing.
Hollow, insincere self congratulation around DEI was a common feature of bad leadership, but it’s not the cause of the problems. Plenty of successful companies with solid hiring also have DEI initiatives without detriment.
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