The Perils of Blind Recruiting

It must have seemed like a good idea. Blind recruiting, as it is called.

The premise was simple. Present a series of resumes to a hiring committee without any indication of the applicant’s race or gender. Given that this was happening in Australia, the issue was gender, not race. Australia is racially homogeneous, for the most part.

In one sense it has been tried before. For years now orchestras have been running blind auditions, auditions where the gender or race of the applicant was hidden. The result has been a considerably larger number of female musicians hired, but no real increase in the number of musicians from racial minority groups.

I cannot tell you whether the music is as good or better. And I do not know whether the change has resulted from the simple fact that the American educational system discriminates against males, rendering them more likely to be video game addicted slugs and less likely to be classically trained musicians.

Anyway, Australia, in its woke wisdom, and in the interest of promoting diversity, instituted a policy of blind recruitment in public service hiring. The consultants who dreamed this up told hiring officers to cull candidates on the basis of their resumes, without there being any personal contact. They were effectively hiring blind. 

The process is obviously dubious. No human being should be reduced to a resume. When people are hired for important corporate jobs they are interviewed in person, often over lunch. The reason is simple. No one hires blind. No one hires based on a resume, especially when resumes are more likely to be skewed and distorted. Given the current mania about diversity, no one is going to offer a bad recommendation to a candidate from a supposedly victimized group.

When Australia instituted its blind recruitment program, another problem arose. Quite simply, recruiters were hiring more males than females. The older system, where bias was allowed to define recruitment, more females were hired, in order to fulfill diversity quotas. The conclusion was simple-- the system of diversity hiring had been causing recruiters to fill the ranks of their departments with less qualified female candidates.

Here is the story, from Australian media, via Maggie’s Farm:

Blind recruitment means recruiters cannot tell the gender of candidates because those details are removed from applications.

It is seen as an alternative to gender quotas and has also been embraced by Deloitte, Ernst & Young, Victoria Police and Westpac Bank.

In a bid to eliminate sexism, thousands of public servants have been told to pick recruits who have had all mention of their gender and ethnic background stripped from their CVs.

Of course, the reasoning was meritocratic. Aside from the fact that no team is comprised of a set of resumes, the experiment was based on the premise that sexism was causing recruiters to ignore the better candidates on the basis of gender. Funnily enough they discovered that the problem was reverse sexism-- people had been hiring underqualified females to fulfill diversity quotas:

The assumption behind the trial is that management will hire more women when they can only consider the professional merits of candidates.

Their choices have been monitored by behavioural economists in the Prime Minister's department — colloquially known as "the nudge unit".

Professor Michael Hiscox, a Harvard academic who oversaw the trial, said he was shocked by the results and has urged caution.

"We anticipated this would have a positive impact on diversity — making it more likely that female candidates and those from ethnic minorities are selected for the shortlist," he said.

"We found the opposite, that de-identifying candidates reduced the likelihood of women being selected for the shortlist."

Does this not lend a certain amount of credence to the assertion made by a retired University of Washington professor, one Pedro Domingos, namely that half of the female STEM faculty in the United States had been hired over more qualified men.

Domingos has not yet been sanctioned or even canceled, because he is already retired. He has of course been roundly condemned. 

The Daily Caller has the story:

A major public university condemned one of its own former professors Monday after he said that many women are selected for engineering positions primarily on the basis of their gender.

“Half of the female STEM faculty in the US were hired over more qualified men,” Pedro Domingos, a retired computer science and engineering professor who has garnered more than 55,000 citations to his published works, according to Google Scholar, posted to Twitter. In response, the University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering admitted that they “cannot limit what emeritus faculty members say via private accounts” before admonishing Domingos’ claim as “meritless, sexist, inflammatory, [and] attention-seeking.”

Naturally, I am not qualified to say whether our great nation has been producing subpar STEM graduates. I cannot tell you whether equity and inclusion hiring criteria have compromised their training and made these graduates incapable of competing against their peers around the world.

And yet, I do note, sadly, a point that has been documented and that I have reported elsewhere. A significant majority of the tech staff at major Silicon Valley tech firms has been trained in foreign countries, most especially in China.

It makes intuitive sense to say that if you hire for diversity you do not hire for merit. And, when the rubber hits the road, the students trained by inferior diversity hires will not be able to compete with their peers from China.