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so this was a question that came up with me and my business partner (we run a game company).

I was telling my partner about the Google Manifesto issue going on and it came into question about actively searching for women and minorities to really add real diversity to our company. but then brings up the question of is that wrong to do?

is actively looking to add diversity an insult. Now the idea here is, I'm not saying that if anyone who has talent comes up to us we would ever say yes/no depending on their skin or gender. But is going to groups online and find talent that does have a diverse background than us actually an insult to them. Like the idea of "getting the token person on the team just to make the white guys feel better about themselves"

It feels like a fine line to walk, and not walking it seems to be our safest bet. but what do you guys think?

The way I see it is this.

You want the person who has the best skills, not who has black skin/a vagina.

Say for an example, you have 4 potential applicants wanting to be interviewed. Out of those 4, one's a man, and one's a woman. However, the one who has the best skills that you require is a white male. The wisest decision to do as a business owner is to hire the most qualified person, i.e. the white male.

Now say, you have the same situation, except this time it's the black man who is the most qualified. You should still hire him, not because he's black, but because he's the most qualified.

Honestly, hiring people just for diversity's sake seems rather patronizing. The laws that are in place are there so you can't tell people they can't be hired because they're black or a woman. Honestly, I feel like this situation could be solved easier if we just included "white" and "man" to that list. If that happened, then everyone's on a level field.

Looking specifically for people of certain race when their race has nothing to do with the job is racism. Same with sex (sexism), sexual orientation (homophobia), etc.

racism and sexism is bad, yes.

Hmm, I see where you're coming from. maybe I'm looking at this in a wrong way:

Talent scouting: The act of looking for new members to work for the team, can be absolutely as diverse as we like but needs to focus on quality first. But just because I find a talent that I like doesn't mean I have to hire them on.

I can scout for n number of people but only have X number of jobs. so while my Talent scouting could be diverse my hiring has to ignore gender, race or anything else and focus on raw quality and teamwork.

Is this a fair way of looking at it then?

This. You are basically saying these people are less qualified and need an unfair advantage to get in.

no, I was not trying to come to that conclusion. I would need to do talent searching either way since I only know a decent number of people in the industry but are already working with other companies. The whole concept is I want to give as many talented people of any race gender or whatever the opportunity to work as a group. Thanks to this thread I am realizing more and more how to clearly find the right people for the job without looking racist or sexist or whatever. I was definitely going at this problem the wrong way and I am glad I talked it out with everyone to get a better way to move forward.

Say for an example, you have 4 potential applicants wanting to be interviewed. Out of those 4, one’s a man, and one’s a woman.

Triangle Mare asking the real questions now.

Also what people? He didn't specify so stop assuming other people are racist.

The choice between finding the best person for the team and explicitly searching for certain people groups is a false dilemma.

I love statistics, polling, surveys, that kind of stuff – so I'm going to explain why it's a false dilemma through this. In surveying, the greatest thing you can do (short of asking literally everyone) is getting a random sample, where there is an equal chance that any single person would be selected. However, sometimes this is out of reach. Often, this is out of reach. To make results more realistic in those situations, people groups may be specifically sought out to help compensate for the inherent errors in the surveying method. It's not as good as a fully random sample, but it's often better than if you didn't seek them out.

Hiring can be similar to this. While ideally the general method of seeking out talent and a good fit for the team would get everyone fit for the role interviewed, this just isn't realistic. Between societal issues and psychological biases, some groups may be underrepresented in the standard talent seeking process. To compensate for this, in such situations, it'd be wise to explicitly seek out talent in certain people groups. This isn't discriminating against other people groups; it is looking for the most talented person.

This doesn't apply to all situations, of course. Just as non-random samples can't be reasonably improved through any other method, sometimes the talent seeking process is fine as-is. Possibly most the time. It's up to the employer to discern if this is a situation where the typical employee pool may need to be supplemented by more artificial selection methods to make it more efficient at finding talent.

thank you, Rivers I know I can get the straight poop from you. Generally speaking, that's what I was thinking.

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