DEI Hiring is Good, Actually
I’ve been an Engineering Manager since 2017, so seven years at the time of this writing. If you’ve never been in a people leading role, there’s something you may not know about managers. And that is, for the most part, we are not judged on the work that we do. We’re not judged on how great we look in meetings, or on our colorful and captivating slide decks, or how punctual our timesheet approvals are. Rather, we are judged on the performance of the teams that we manage. We are accountable both to our companies and to our teams. There are solid, measurable metrics that we must satisfy every quarter. Project velocity, OKRs, KPIs are just a few of the measures that we as managers must successfully deliver.
There are real consequences that result from these metrics. Our bonuses, our RSU grants, our promotions, and increasingly our very employment depend upon the demonstrated success of the teams we manage.
There are even greater stakes as a hiring manager. It is very expensive to hire a new engineer. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, it can cost up to three to four times the annual salary of the employee to hire and train a new engineer up to the level where they are useful contributors. Making the wrong decision and hiring a low performer is a dire situation and could have highly negative professional consequences for the manager who made the call.
And this is where the whole concept of the stereotypical “DEI hire” falls apart.
The incentive to hire an unqualified person because they check some supposed diversity checkbox is simply not there. A low quality hire would negatively affect my team, cost my company money, and hold back my own career ambitions. There’s just no reason to do it.
However, there are reasons to embrace DEI. Here’s another fact about management you might not know: finding qualified talent is hard. Finding good people who are familiar with the technology you use is hard. Finding people with the right combination of people skills and technical skills is very hard. This means that if you want to catch the best talent, you need to cast a wider net.
But here’s where it gets messy and political. In 2004 a study was performed by the American Economic Review. In this study, researchers sent out 5000 identical resumes. Half of these resumes had “white sounding” names like Emily and Greg, while the other half had non-white sounding names, like Lakisha and Jamal. The researchers found that the resumes with white-sounding names got up to 50 percent more callbacks than the non-white sounding names. 50 percent. Even though the resumes were identical. Had these been real candidates, Lakisha and Jamal would have been passed over and the companies would have missed out on talented, qualified employees, simply because the people reviewing the resumes somehow didn’t get past the name at the top of the paper. There’s been more recent follow-up studies that found similar evidence of implicit racial bias in hiring (although at lower rates. Hurray for progress!).
So this is where DEI is beneficial. The thing about implicit bias is that we don’t know we’re doing it. It’s unconscious, and we all do it. We all make snap judgments about people all the time. I do it, and you do it. The point of DEI training is to teach you how to catch yourself acting on your own unconscious biases — biases that actually cause people to overlook highly qualified candidates and fail to scoop up talented people who would have been valuable contributors. People who would have fixed your problems, helped your team, and made you and your company money.
In short, the point of DEI in hiring isn’t to pressure you into hiring bad candidates, it’s to prevent you from overlooking good ones.
