At a place I used to work, they didn’t hire people specifically because of their skin colour. OTOH, they did arrange for people who were visible minorities to sometimes get a second chance at interviews if they were on the bubble. As a result, sometimes someone did well in their second set of interviews and was hired.
The thing is, we’re all biased. It’s not just overt racism, it’s often subtle things like liking a candidate more when they’re easy to talk to, and sometimes they’re easy to talk to because they come from a similar background and have similar experiences and interests.
Does that mean that sometimes a straight, white, male candidate had a bad day, messed up his interviews, didn’t get a second chance, and didn’t get hired? Yep. I’m sure there were occasionally times where the 100% most qualified candidate wasn’t the one who got the job. But, the idea was to try to slightly tilt the playing field to account for unconscious bias. In the end, nobody was hired who didn’t meet a very high bar.
As an aside though, some of the best people I worked with were at a previous job before that. They were much more diverse than the people at the bigger company I worked at later that did that second-round stuff. I wasn’t ever part of the hiring process at that first place, but however they did it, they brought in people from really diverse backgrounds who were really great. These same people wouldn’t have even been given an interview at the second place because they didn’t have some of the right things on their resumes.
At a place I used to work, they didn’t hire people specifically because of their skin colour. OTOH, they did arrange for people who were visible minorities to sometimes get a second chance at interviews if they were on the bubble. As a result, sometimes someone did well in their second set of interviews and was hired.
The thing is, we’re all biased. It’s not just overt racism, it’s often subtle things like liking a candidate more when they’re easy to talk to, and sometimes they’re easy to talk to because they come from a similar background and have similar experiences and interests.
Does that mean that sometimes a straight, white, male candidate had a bad day, messed up his interviews, didn’t get a second chance, and didn’t get hired? Yep. I’m sure there were occasionally times where the 100% most qualified candidate wasn’t the one who got the job. But, the idea was to try to slightly tilt the playing field to account for unconscious bias. In the end, nobody was hired who didn’t meet a very high bar.
As an aside though, some of the best people I worked with were at a previous job before that. They were much more diverse than the people at the bigger company I worked at later that did that second-round stuff. I wasn’t ever part of the hiring process at that first place, but however they did it, they brought in people from really diverse backgrounds who were really great. These same people wouldn’t have even been given an interview at the second place because they didn’t have some of the right things on their resumes.