Discrimination has to exist in some form when hiring

Think about it. As defined by the Cambridge Dictionary, discrimination (as noun) is defined as “seeing a difference”. So the very fact that you’re favoring one applicant over another, or offering the job to one candidate over another, will be due to elements of discrimination within your decision making process. You preferred the educational achievements of one, or the CV stability of another, or the extra couple of years of experience and so forth. In other instances, despite all our training and education on both conscious and unconscious biases and how to reduce or theoretically eliminate them, there is by human nature a natural element of noticing the differences between people - he was black, she was white, he was unkempt, she was sweating, he had crooked teeth, she had an odd lisp - these things will inevitably lead us to some level of discrimination in our hiring decisions as well.

Quite rightly, we have legislation in place across many countries, that offer some protection against the discrimination that unfairly treats one group of people in a different and worse way than we would treat other people, be it due to gender or gender identity, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, age, disability, politics and more.

However, I think the raft of anti-discrimination legislation has now spooked so many of us into a state of fear for being both compliant and “politically correct”, to the point that we’re not getting to ask the things that really matter in a job interview. Before you go hollering, know that I’m in full agreement for ending blatantly stupid discrimination.  I have lived through the years where how I answered questions on my age, sexuality, skirt length and family plans, would make or break my chances of getting the job! But I think that there’s so much fear today of saying the wrong thing, and a misunderstanding of how far the legislation extends, that interviews are often a waste of time for all but those who are professionally skilled in “information extraction” techniques.

Fear of discrimination accusations means talent is lost

Think about an instance for Line Manager X, working for a tiny company where long hours are the norm, and are needed because of their commitments to customers.

Applicant Y has all the required skills and experience, but has just volunteered that she has a young family.  Our line manager is now wondering how she will manage to juggle her personal commitments and work demands, and he's wanting reassurance that she will be able to reliably work the long hours.  However he's not going to ask her more questions to check into this because, in the event that her answers aren't satisfactory, he doesn't want the risk of being seen to discriminate against her. Instead he finds some other trite excuse to not hire her, and potentially misses out on a great employee because he couldn’t just have a frank discussion about how she might successfully accommodate the job needs.

Consider Line Manager C, running a large team in a big corporation.  The team is of one gender and of one racial profile, not representative of the rest of the workforce or the company customers and diversity is desperately needed. She wants to broaden this out as a result, but isn’t comfortable briefing her recruiter on what she really needs as she doesn’t want to break any discrimination laws. So she views CV after CV with nonsensical feedback to the recruiter, until she finally finds some profiles that might fit her diversity agenda, regardless of the fact that they’re unlikely to be high performers (or until the recruiter spots the trend, tests it, and can deliver on the hidden agenda).

Now if the line managers in both instances had been given high quality interview training they could have dealt with each of these challenges very easily.  But most line managers will throw their hands up in the air rather than spend time getting canny with their interview or briefing criteria techniques (this isn’t after all necessary for their “day jobs” and they have more pressing priorities in the scheme of things) - and both miss out on potentially great talent as a result.

Fear of discrimination stops job seekers from making the right choices

Also consider Candidate D, who knows he is perfectly suited to the job and wants it, plus he is the company's preferred candidate. He had an alcohol abuse history many years ago, now firmly under control, but has been repeatedly told about the social aspect of the job being essential to the company culture. He really wants to ask whether his chances to succeed and progress will hinge on racking up a bar bill, or whether more sober client entertainment activities would suffice.  But exploring this in greater detail, may mean disclosure of his health history.  He's sure the company will take a dim view of his past, and he won't get the job, so he keeps quiet and proceeds to accept the employment offer.  2 months after starting, he's finally been able to understand the extent of the company's hard party culture, and to the employer's surprise, Candidate D chooses to quit rather than risk his health.  If only there was a way for him to have asked what he really needed to know during the hiring process, without fear of being discriminated against for a lifestyle of many years ago.   Sadly, what he hadn’t realised, because he never did ask, is that the CEO was about to cut all alcohol activities because of abuse issues within his leadership team.

In the instance of Candidate P, she had a huge attraction to working for a particularly company - she had friends and family there, used the products, and felt a real connection to the organisation. She’d been through an impressive interview process and was offered the job. And then she learnt of an operation she had to have, which meant she’d be out of action for 2 months. Rather than disclose the health issue, for fear that she’d be less well regarded due to the nature of the operation, she simply declined the employment offer. The company was disappointed, but moved ahead with their second contender. If only Candidate P had felt comfortable enough to discuss the situation with the company, she’d have learnt that they’d have supported her through the surgery and recovery time with no impact at all on her ongoing career prospects with them.

Can hiring without discrimination exist?

Interviewing is fraught with hazards.  So many stakeholders dancing around, and not actually finding out what they really want to know, and second guessing and presuming as a result, all because they're terrified of being accused of discriminating against someone, or presuming that they’ll be discriminated against. This could in part be solved by HR and/or Talent Acquisition executives taking more time to thoroughly train hiring leaders in what they can or cannot say…how far they can go with their questioning. The challenge of course, is that many within the HR function don’t have those skills themselves, and are too used to staying within their own interpretations of what constitutes discrimination. Another and certainly a very simple answer, is for hiring leaders to spend more time talking about good and challenging aspects of the company and/or functional culture, what other staff have been praised or penalised for in the past, the realities of performance expectations rather than the corporate speak version, how that leader likes and dislikes the team to interact and communicate with each other and with him/her, and the kinds of things that (away from the corporate speak again) the leader gets excited or worried about both at work and at home. It might just give both parties the chance to have a frank understanding of how likely and far, each is prepared to flex and change to accommodate the other.

Others would argue that use of artificial intelligence throughout the hiring process is the answer to reduce any and all risk of discrimination and wind up with the right calibre of candidate. I disagree. Applying machine learnt algorithms is a fine theory, but if you don’t get the programming right, you just code discrimination into the AI tool as Amazon found out some years ago. Redacting key information from CV’s and Resumes is also a fine theory, but whilst you might get a more diverse talent pool past the screening process and into interviews, any inherent biases will kick back in the moment candidates and hiring leaders meet together, resulting in both parties feeling like they’ve simply wasted time “going through the motions”. And if you are actually trying to have specific diversity needs met, fully “blind” resumes defeat your purpose. Most of all, nothing in AI that I’ve seen yet, allows those more personal conversations that are needed to overcome the deeper heartfelt concerns of candidates and of hiring leaders. Fundamentally, we have to find a way for both parties to ask the things they really need to understand, without being worried about repercussions.

We’d be interested to hear your thoughts and experiences on this.