Political Memes

When I was a hiring manager the DEI directives I received weren’t “pick a minority over a more qualified person” it was “be cognizant of your biases and consider the benefits a different perspective will bring to your team when making a hiring decision”. I had to take a training course that exposed me to some things I hadn’t really taken into account before and I found it to be beneficial.

So, care to give an example, how that example is executed in policy or decision making process and how that results in more women, LGBTQ or POC being hired? "Consider the benefits a different perspective will bring to your team when making a hiring decision" certainly sounds an awful lot like corp-speak for "consider how being a member of a demographic underrepresented in your team is in itself a qualification and should be treated as a point in their favor over other candidates who are not."

Like repeatedly mentioning that the institution is a historically black college and emphasizing a "need to fit in with the college community" as code for "we want to hire a black person" or companies listing literally impossible job requirements as a pretense for getting H1B visas (because "we want employees we can abuse because we can threaten to deport them if they don't play along" doesn't technically fly as opposed to "we cannot find qualified employees domestically" because all applicants are either under qualified or lying because the qualifications are impossible).

I was never forced to make a decision in a particular way or questioned after the fact.

Instead, you were taught essentially what was expected of you draped in corporate sensitivity speak, and expected to do your job as intended. Had you not in a broad sense started hiring more in line with whatever demographic alterations the training was meant to get you lean more in favor of (for example, if it was gender-focused and you were not broadly speaking hiring more women than before) there would have been further training. No direct calling out of specific hiring decisions for being the wrong race/gender/whatever. Because the layers of indirection and "awareness building" and "implicit bias training" and the like is done the way it is because a direct corporate mandate to to hire a specific number of a specific demographic would be illegal discrimination so instead you have to walk around the subject until you've worn a "hire more of this demographic" shaped trail.