Companies are actively focusing on diversity which is good thing. It’s goes beyond being social trend or a corporate fad, diversity makes business sense. But there’s a little marketing/communication problem which I feel this exercise suffers from.
So you have companies actively pushing diversity and hiring the people who are missing. They label these folk as “diversity candidates” or “diversity hires”. These companies are not the dropping the bar, they’re pushing harder to get people that the system/biases pushed away. There’s a problem with this terminology. It reeks of reservation. In any correction system strictly, we hate making mistakes - but the mistake we hate the most are the false positives (we hate false negatives too but we see them so often we’ve grown to tolerate them) We absolutely abhor the innocent getting punished.
When you hire diversity candidate, here’s what the recruiter is telling himself/herself. “Oh we worked really hard to help someone reach their full potential” Here’s what everyone else is hearing
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“They dropped the bar to hire to this dumb person who doesn’t deserve to be here”_
Everyone else feels that we didn’t hire someone better because we had to fulfil this diversity quota. Hence I propose we change the terminology to “Hidden Gems”. These are talented people. Had we not been living in a biased society, they … umm we wouldn’t be calling them they. They’d be us. But that’s not true and that’s what we want to change. So find your “hidden gems”, don’t onboard your “diversity hires”.