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_m8fo

So who's not being discriminated against? Let's review who's currently getting the short end of the stick.

1. Women [1]

2. Older Americans [2]

3. Minorities [3]

4. Foreigners [4]

What can be done about this? The answer is clear: anonymous screening, interviewing and hiring of candidates. All other solutions are subpar.

People will argue that there's value to be had in asking about things such as hobbies, and other irrelevant, superfluous information, but those who advocate this are probably not in one of the groups mentioned.

---

[1] http://www.vogue.com/article/female-discrimination-tech-indu...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/lizryan/2014/01/31/the-ugly-tru...

[3] http://money.cnn.com/2015/11/25/news/economy/racial-discrimi...

[4] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alev-dudek/foreign-born-citize...

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Just to be clear: are you advocating that all organizations be required to perform this "anonymous" form of hiring, lest they face the long arm of the law?

I think that's crazy. Talent seeking is a space where diversity makes a great deal of sense, as evinced by the fact that many very diverse companies do very well.

I'm confused -- anonymity wouldn't affect diversity, unless the organization was discriminating to begin with.

What are your arguments against anonymity, exactly?

I don't know if this is the specific problem that the person you are responding to was alluding to, but: a purely anonymous system is going to end up with hiring tons of young white males--surely fewer than a company that actively discriminates against other groups, but noticibly more than a company that is actively looking for diversity--due to young white makes making up a large percentage of the available talent pool at any given level of expertise (due to a combination of factors, including but not limited to all of "available time", "increasing population", "availability bias", and "systemic oppression"). A company might specifically find value in "we don't just want the world's best engineers: we want a diverse set of backgrounds and viewpoints", and a forced anonymous hiring process actually removes the ability to do that, which might actually help continue to entrench the systemic oppression issue (as then everyone builds things for the same market demographic as that's all they understand).

If it's okay to hire for diversity, is it okay to say "I only want to hire white guys in their 20s and 30s"? If not, why not? Is there proof that "diversity hiring" (back in the day we called this "affirmative action", the lingo changes but the goals remain the same) provides substantial benefits to an organization? If so, fantastic! We should promote it across the industry. I have yet to see any data that this is the case though.

"In God We Trust; all others bring data"

A lot of what you say really requires some evidence.

For example:

> a purely anonymous system is going to end up with hiring tons of young white males-

A system that's non anonymous has already proven itself to hire a ton of young white males...

> surely fewer than a company that actively discriminates against other groups, but noticibly more than a company that is actively looking for diversity-

Citations needed.

> A company might specifically find value in "we don't just want the world's best engineers: we want a diverse set of backgrounds and viewpoints",

Discrimination isn't good, period. That means discriminating for or against white males. Also, you imply that the groups I mentioned couldn't succeed on their own merit.

Overall, you basically encourage discrimination. Got it.

A lot of what you say really requires some evidence.

You literally just kicked off a discussion by using four op-ed pieces as sources. You have no grounds to tell people their posts require some evidence.

Get some actual facts and figures and then make your point.

His point is actually your point, but less emotional.

Also, in debate, you have neither the grounds to speak or be silent. Rules to free discussion exist because we want them to.

How do you anonymously interview for cultural fit?

You don't, because "culture fit" sounds nice but in practice means "excuse for otherwise-illegal discrimination".

Anonymity would not affect diversity, but it would not necessarily enforce it. Indeed until all races, genders, sexual orientation, socioeconomic strata, etc. apply in identical numbers, one must discriminate in order to guarantee diversity.

EDIT: Upon further reflection, anonymity could help combat ageism (scrubbing specific graduation and employment dates, for example). but in the general sense I believe the point still stands.

Isn't the purpose of anonymity in this situation to ensure that the best candidates get hired? Wouldn't diversity be the natural result, assuming that diverse types of candidates are qualified? I'm not advocating for this as law but I feel like this would encourage rather than discourage diversity.

This is part of why I dislike employment anti-discrimination laws. They probably worked better for manual labor and other commodity jobs. A compromise would be to limit them to these kinds of jobs.

I'd suggest providing sources that aren't op-ed pieces - one of them from a tabloid - if you want to be taken seriously.

Which of the following do you not believe? All of these are common knowledge. I don't have time to be educating people won't aren't aware of basic facts. Maybe you're not from the U.S, so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt(all of the links I posted link to actual sources, anyway).

1. Women are discriminated against in the workplace in the United States.

2. Minorities are discriminated against in the workplace in the United States.

3. Older Americans (unnecessary, as the evidence is already provided) are discriminated against in the workplace in the United States.

4. Foreigners are discriminated against in the workplace in the United States.

What I believe or not is completely irrelevant - that's an attempt on your behalf of re-framing what I said, and I reject it.

If you want a serious informed discussion on these issues, find some reasonably impartial and factual sources with real figures, not op-ed pieces from your favourite partisan publications. If you don't have time to provide sources, then I'd suggest not talking about the topic since you're ill-equipped to discuss it.

However, checking the past experience of the applicant -- which seems perfectly reasonable for the hiring company to do -- would still allow discrimination against older Americans and foreigners. I'm not sure how that could be fixed even with anonymity.

simple: You don't write all of your experience in your resume, only the experience relevant to the job you apply for. They want 5-7 years experience in Java? List only your last two Java jobs, don't mention that you did 15 years of C++ before that.

That's easy for someone who's worked at many different companies. What about the applicant who's primarily worked for a single company for many years? This is much more likely to be true for an older applicant. Do you lie about how many years you worked at the company?

Regardless, it still doesn't solve the problem for foreigners who may have only worked for companies outside the US.

Government does this where they use civil service exams.

The problem is that maintaining a meaningful evaluation process is difficult. So the exams tend to remove some forms of discrimination, especially against women, but reinforce others, and create other issues too. The process works overall.

In one place I'm familiar with, black and Latino minorities candidates successfully sued because although the candidates had good professional credentials and outcomes, the test disadvantaged them because their educations in grade/high school tended to suck and people in these categories did more poorly in questions regarding English grammar, analogies, etc. Foreign born people have a similar experience.

If you use these types of methods to hire people, you'll need to adopt government style hiring practices. If you need 3 people, hire 5, because you're likely to be forced to hire some duds. When duds are too bad and firing gets difficult, you promote the idiots, etc.

What are the other forms of discrimination that are reinforced? I'm still unconvinced that anonymous interviewing isn't superior in every way for those who are currently discriminated against.

It seems most of the counter arguments basically say "you'll discriminate," unrealizing that occurs, either way.

The cultural discrimination that I cited is one example.

You also create a system where people who are good at testing or manipulating systems will excel in. Personally, I've found in the .gov environments that the best technical people score in the 80-85 range. The people who do better on the exams tend to come from certain less technical backgrounds or job roles.

Taking human judgement out of the process just displaces accountability to some test or other assessment. IMO, the way to fix these things is to treat hiring like an incident. Do a post-mortem/debrief, document how decisions are made. Coach people hiring to be better at it.

Does someone doing anonymous screening get to see the past experience of the candidate?

If so, it doesn't solve the issues raised in this article.

In the actual research [1] you can see that the discrimination is also affected by gender. In any case, anonymous interviewing doesn't inherently require one to see the duration of ones past experience.

I agree the implementation could be tricky, but in any case, it's better than what currently exists.

[1] http://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/economic...

Maybe only mention recent experiences, say, last 8 or 10 years.

I also don't believe that the hiring process can be made 100% anonymously, with a total lack of bias. That would be impossible. You have to meet with the candidate in person at some point, and get to see what they look like and learn their name.

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