I ran into this problem at a previous job. We hired an Hispanic woman. The quota criteria were for X% women, X% "diversity" (without getting specific). Hiring the Hispanic woman allowed us to kill 2 birds with one stone, but HR got up in arms about it. We won out, but it was a struggle.
These quotas are really crap. The problem is, when you want to hire the best person, the quotas kill you. You have to hire a "diversity" candidate, which means you can't hire a white male, basically. As a result, your pool of candidates is immediately cut by anywhere from 25-45%.
Very few people complain about this kind of racist behavior, because it is done in order to "attain a higher goal". Personally, I don't believe that at all. The goal of business is profitability and good management. That means you hire the BEST candidate, regardless of ethnicity. Sometimes that means you will hire alot of white men. Sometimes (in my business especially) alot of white women (they make great salespeople). Quotas are just a means of relieving people of the responsibility of finding the right people for a job, and a means of making them artificially feel "better" about the people they are hiring.
I've never turned someone down for a job based on anything other than ability, and I know that's true of virtually everyone else I've worked with. On the other hand, that's not really true because I've turned away a few better qualified white men and women...but not because I wanted to. |
