Which part of DEI do you hate?

My company (major conglomerate) keeps track of demographics like this, at every level. Even as specific KPIs like "women in semior executive roles." While ive never actually seen any written plans or anyone admitting they hired someone for a role to meet a metric, there are a handful of things that do stick out as fishy.

There have been roles that have been upgraded in title but not scope when a non white male has taken over, and there are certainly a few people who you look at and think, "how the hell did you get this job." That said, there is one person who is in charge of almost all my questionable experiences, and hes the kind of person who would do that to meet a metric because HR told him he had to, not because he sees value in it.

Most of our other managers approach it much differently. We try to widen our recruiting pool by going different places and by consciously making sure our recruiter team is diverse

I manage a team of about 50. I've been in management for about the past decade. Prior to that, I was a technical lead heavily involved in hiring. I've also run multiple intern programs that hire by the dozen each summer. I've hired hundreds and been in thousands of interviews.

Ive never once seen someone hired because of the color of their skin.

I do however aggressively look for people from different backgrounds to be in my candidate pools when hiring. That can really mean anything. Mono culture is a huge detriment to the org because then everyone ends up thinking the same way. I look for people willing to challenge the status quo and bring unique perspectives while still being a great teammate.

There are probably people I've hired who normally wouldn't have gotten an interview based on their background but then were the best candidate. When I've had candidates that are equal, I've occasionally hired the one who is most dissimilar in skills/thought process/goals to my current team because that helps us grow. The decision was never someone's skin color, but their background certainly could have influenced the items I chose as my hiring decisions.

DEI is not just hiring. DEI is creating a culture where people of different backgrounds can succeed. There are so many different ways to be successful at the vast majority of the roles I hire. It's my job to make sure my org is setup so that people can be successful through as many approaches as possible. This is the part I see most often missed. If your culture only allows the loud, brash to lead, I would have missed many of my best hires over the years who led in varied ways.

So three scenarios come up when I think of my experiences on selecting candidates.

One time, we had a woman apply. Which was almost unheard of, it was the first time I could ever remember a woman applicant. The thing was, she was also by far the best candidate. In a round of applicants that otherwise I'm sure we wouldn't have bothered hiring, she nailed it. Retroactively, they declared the white guy that was interviewed the previous day the one to hire, who was kind of the best of the worst. Something vague about him having more years in the industry, but I overheard a concern that they didn't trust one of our employees to behave himself in front of a very attractive hire, and that it was best for everyone to head off the sexual harassment by keeping him away from her. In which case a DEI policy would have actually been nice to counter the really bad behavior going on.

Another time, different company, we were about to do the interviews and then suddenly they were all canceled. Why? Management picked the person to fill the spot, and decided to skip all technical assessment. Because this time another woman actually applied and that was it, they needed a woman to make numbers. The person was about as well as you can expect for accepting the first person to come along. This was a position intended for an experienced industry veteran, but instead we got someone with zero experience and their education wasn't even consistent with the work needed.

A third time, it was a hiring position where only black people were even allowed to apply. I don't have complaints about the results here, because we got one of the best employees we've ever had out of it. But I can't pretend that the specific hiring practice was fair. However the place is still, after all this, like 90% white men, so it's not like white guys aren't getting their chances.

Does it count if you’re saying: hire him as the best candidate but you have to make a high offer to get him because he’s black and in high demand

My field is white and Asian male dominated, so when the best candidate is an underrepresented demographic we need to jump on it

I was put in a team as a "care lead" because I was Polish and the team was Polish too. Weren't allowed to be the actual teamleader, that was given to a dude from the US. He was absent like 99% of the time, made like two one hour meetings to "transfer knowledge" over 6 months. Then he came back, started getting pissy that people treated me as the teamlead instead of him, went to his manager and got me "transferred" out. Also, all of the scrummasters (like 8 different teams) were black, went through the company "academy" (basically a 3 month bootcamp) without any prior IT / programming experience, with completely incomprehensible accents. Some of them were later fired for security issues (one took a company laptop with medical software and client data, hardcore HIPAA shit, to Africa, without disclosing it, getting it cleared / secured), incompetence or bad fit. I think three were left after a year I was there.

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.