What impact do diversity goals have on job applications when demographic information is requested? Can your response affect your application? How are these demographics considered when targeting diversity goals? #DiversityGoals #JobApplications #DemographicInformation #AdverseTreatment #Inclusion #EqualOpportunity
If hiring has diversity goals, then it can negatively affect you. This would be something HR does when presenting resumes to the hiring manager when there’s an abundance of applications. They may select a few strong candidates from the entire pool then a candidate or 2 from the diverse pile.
It could also mean recruiters focus their efforts on reaching out to diverse groups to find candidates, but this is more rare.
After this stage, the diversity effort usually stops and the hiring manager(s) selects the best fit from the pool of candidates HR passed over to them.
In South Africa, it 100% can affect your application. Most job applications at big companies specify that it is a BEE job, which means that black applicants get preference. Black women get first pick, then black men, and so on. Until you reach white men at the bottom of the list. So yes, it counts against you in South Africa.
But not all companies do this/have to do this. It’s just the big ones that mostly do, which has to do with the company’s BBBEE status and the relevance when doing business with other companies/getting tenders from the government.
Employers should use it to inform their recruiting efforts, not base hiring decisions on. If they are focused or diversity, they can see if they are getting applicants from diverse populations or only from a few and then modify efforts to get a wider variety of applicants. They also use it to report later on diversity of staff that are employed.
Obviously it depends on the specific circumstance. But in general, the “correct” way to do this is that the data is gathered, is *not* used at hiring time, but then *is* analyzed retroactively – e.g. “over the last six months, what was our hiring ratio by gender?”. They use that analysis to determine whether there are potential biases that need to be corrected; if they identify a bias, they work on finding its cause and resolving it.
Please know in any decent company, your data isn’t all distributed to the hiring authority. So when you enter that you are 35, white, male with a bachelor’s born in the U.S, the only information the hiring team gets is bachelor’s degree. Then they get your documents that you upload that are relevant, like resumes/CV, cover letter, proof of degree, etc. The other information is stored so that non-connected later reports can be run on the population of hired people. This way, the company has hiring statistics, but they aren’t factored in immediate hiring considerations.
The responses to the question do not go to the hiring manager. I get their resume and cover letter but not their answers to those questions or even if they agreed to answer them or not.
It’s for government reporting requirements in most cases. From what I’ve seen with applicant tracking systems, I cannot see the answers to those questions when reviewing their profile/resume. It might be somewhere else but it’s not something I can see or factor in when deciding who to interview.
The demographic questions aren’t for making hiring decisions; they’re for analysing later to see if the hiring process is biased. An unbiased process should result in hiring demographics that match the general population; if they don’t match, you can start investigating why.
For my organisation (a mental health charity), it’s to monitor the diversity of the workforce to ensure that correct and appropriate support, advice and guidance is in place for all needs within the organisation, primarily. So for example, we have a high percentage of people who have non-heterosexual sexual orientations, and so we have policies in place to support and protect them, and we have a peer support/social network group to allow everyone to be themselves at work.