What if we helped minorities, women, and others on the outside meet the qualifications instead of lowering the standards? And yes that also includes rewriting some of the qualifications to be more realistic, I am not discounting that.
This comment is coming off as incendiary, judging by the quick clapback style of response to simply the first clause. I want to emphasis I also believe requirements should be rewritten to be more realistic and pertinent to the job. The solution in my view is to cater to the people who do take job requirements seriously (which to my understanding is the reason why women for example are excluded more) rather than just throw your hands up and say "job requirements are a joke"
The issue is that people in the industry have been trained to know that minimum requirements are bullshit and apply anyway. So if women and minorites are underrepresented behind the gate, and see the gate as far more impenetrable than the groups which have already made it in, then setting these requirements aspirationally is keeping them out.
John Carmack is arguably one of the most qualified people in the industry for this role, and he doesn't meet the requirements.
So it's not the case that there's piles of white men who _do_ meet the requirements that get it instead, and we just need to help minorities get to that level, it's that there's piles of white men that recognise the requirements are nonsense, so apply and get it without meeting them. Setting the requirements to what the recruiters actually require isn't lowering the bar as a result.
Additionally, as mentioned elsewhere in the thread, fake requirements can be used as a reason to arbitrarily reject otherwise good candidates (for example to provide cover for rejection over being a minority). So it's not unreasonable to suspect that minorities have learned to ignore those listings as they just waste time.
It seems like it would be an much easier task to simply broadcast this knowledge to women and minorities than it would be to change the practices of every HR department, no?
Sure, and I've personally been in charity events for economically disadvantaged groups where that's been one of the more important pieces of advice we gave, so such approaches are ongoing, but still the studies indicate the message hasn't gotten through with current levels - so you'd need to either significantly scale up such efforts to reach more people at a personal enough level to convince them, or try another approach.
If that even works. Do white guys who apply say to themselves "those requirements are BS", and minorities say "I don't meet those requirements so I shouldn't apply"? Or is it white guys are more likely to not read them as closely? Or white guys are more likely to feel "I'm good enough to do it regardless of what it asks for"? Or something else? Because just telling minorities "the requirements are more suggestions than requirements" isn't going to help if it's any of those.
You know how peoples used to have folklores and stories that got passed down? Well, we still do, but the culturally transmitted information is now stuff like "Oh, yeah, those requirement lists are bullshit".
Of course not. There are even certain minorities which are known to extremely exagerrate their abilities and accomplishments (even when they wouldn't last a day on actual job).
I really think it's as simple as having friends/peers in the know-how or not. Some people have family members, classmates, maybe even majority of their social circle working in IT which obviously exposes them to inner workings including this issue with job requirements. And then there are people whose social circle is far from IT so they just don't have confidence to (pretty much) lie on resume.
In my experiences of mentoring underrepresented groups in the industry, it’s a matter of morality. Many see it as straight up dishonest to do so. It’s not just some secret hack they can just employ; you’re asking them to cast their morals aside and do something they believe is wrong.
I actually think this _worse_, let alone _much harder_ than simply telling HR to chill with that shit.
So there are two options: tell all minorities to do something they don't know about, or tell people on the top to write realistic requirements. And you think that the right thing to do is to go around and teach this to every minority group. This tells a lot about your position of privilege.
Is it somehow secret knowledge reserved to "privileged" people that minimum requirements on job ads should be interpreted as a wish list more than a list of hard requirements?
It's commonly talked about in a lot of places online, including here.
It's also something you very quickly learn when searching for your 1st job. If you take minimum requirements at face value, there's almost no jobs anyone straight out of school would qualify for.
> Is it somehow secret knowledge reserved to "privileged" people that minimum requirements on job ads should be interpreted as a wish list more than a list of hard requirements?
It is definitely cultural knowledge that not all people have, and, more to the point, an understanding of what parts of a particular job ad that are stated as MQs are likely to be nice-to-haves and which are real MQs and which are nice to haves behind which are hiding real MQs (such as “Ph.D. in <field>” really meaning something like “a Ph.D. would be nice but a Masters is a hard minimum”), and therefore, how to evaluate whether it is worth expending effort applying for a job is non-universal cultural knowledge.
This often requires understanding of the hiring cultures of the particular job-field, industry, employer, and sometimes organizational subunit. Which is, for people just starting out (or looking outside of their past experience), highly network dependent. And equally substantively qualified people from underrepresented demographics arr likely to have weaker, in terms relevant to the task at hand, networks and therefore less access to this cultural knowledge.
> It's also something you very quickly learn when searching for your 1st job.
Or not, in part because there are lots of places where its not true and if you act like it is you will learn hard.
Lying about requirements in hiring may be common, but it is not a universal norm, and calling it out and denormalizing it is a good thing, even outside of discriminatory impact, but its also very much a practice that has particular adverse impact on underrepresented minorities.
When HR creates fake requirements the goal is exactly to be able to weed out anyone they don't like. If someone is not from the "right" group they'll just let them know that they don't meet the "minimum requirements".
That’s a different thesis from what we’re discussing. To clarify, we’re assuming the interviews are fair and the min requirements are being munged by an HR department that doesn’t understand the list that engineering has given them and potential applicants are not even applying based on these garbled job postings. If you think that HR departments are biased and are making up fake requirements, that very well could be the case in some situations, but it’s not what we’re talking about here.
If John Carmack doesn't meet the standards, then you probably shouldn't worry about 'lowering them.' As if making tech more accessible requires lowering any standards, anyways.
I think these can actually mean the same thing here, it depends if the thing you're passing judgement on is interpreted to be the requirements, or the act of lowering the requirements.
You should worry about the requirements because they're bad and need fixing.
You shouldn't worry about the consequences of lowering the requirements because you weren't enforcing them anyway.
And why are women and minorities unaware of the wink and a nod? What else are they not aware of?
Are they not able to reason through the fact that the requirements must logically be not realistic? Are women known to not question authority to the same degree as men? Why not endeavor to fix that about women.
It is about who assumes rules will be bend for them. If you apply for role where you dont fit requirements, it can be interpreted as ambitions or arrogant or stupid.
I don't understand why being seen as arrogant or stupid by a faceless HR robot in a company you don't work for should matter to a person. It feels like a confidence issue that somebody should look into resolving so that they can live a more fulfilling life.
What if we helped minorities, women, and others on the outside meet the qualifications instead of lowering the standards? And yes that also includes rewriting some of the qualifications to be more realistic, I am not discounting that.
This comment is coming off as incendiary, judging by the quick clapback style of response to simply the first clause. I want to emphasis I also believe requirements should be rewritten to be more realistic and pertinent to the job. The solution in my view is to cater to the people who do take job requirements seriously (which to my understanding is the reason why women for example are excluded more) rather than just throw your hands up and say "job requirements are a joke"