Is hiring just to meet diversity quotas an unfair approach?

“In one of the leading global IT firms, there is a lot of push to hire women, and sometimes in teams, about 60-70% are women. But move up the ladder, and not even 25% remain. The company failed to retain most of them because of its hiring bias in the initial stages," observes an HR head at an IT company in India. Consider what Abhijit Bhaduri, talent management advisor and executive coach, has to say as he calls out biases that come into play in base-level recruitment, when resumes reveal nothing about the competence of candidates for work roles, but only school, college, city, gender and other such details. “Often, the language in job advertisements [has] an inherent bias towards—or against—one gender or group," says Bhaduri.

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools used in recruitment promise to eliminate biases, but then again, AI needs human oversight in most cases of early adoption. In any case, companies must invest in training their managers responsible for hiring to check these biases. Crucially, the data that trains AI engines also needs to be periodically checked for biases that may keep a group out of the consideration set.

While biases of ethnicity, age, gender and alumni fraternity have long been prevalent in India Inc, at career-starting levels, many people struggle to cope with more subtle ones—such as pin-code identification of an address as a proxy for the family’s broad social status—that may take years to erase or reduce in prominence on a resume.

Since the Indian IT sector is one of our major recruiters from colleges across the country, its young recruits are expected to acclimatize quickly to the work environment and fall in line promptly with the way things are done. But, behind this facade of uniformity among new recruits, there are young urbane professionals whose relative sophistication in social terms can put them ahead of their peers. As insiders reveal, line managers often show a preference for those with urbane accents and behaviour that may take others from smaller towns or more modest backgrounds more time to acquire. While new IT executives are typically quick to learn, no matter where they come from, rarely are investments made to ensure that managers overcome biases on this score. In a skill-driven sector where the biggest cost borne is the wage bill for employees, this should not be the case.

At most companies with a diversity agenda, a gender imbalance seems to have top-most salience as an issue to be addressed. Many women drop out before reaching mid or senior levels, and these positions sometimes get plugged with new hires without much thought given to whether someone from another team within the company could be trained for the vacant profile, even if this would preserve the desired diversity ratio without requiring a lateral recruit. It is rare for a company to conduct an internal study to check at which stage its women employees are dropping out, identify job roles that have traditionally been male bastions, and, if identified, understand why this might be so.

A company keen to ensure equity should also check if its women candidates are recruited using parameters that are based on biases. Arundhati Bhattacharya, chairperson and CEO of Salesforce India and former chairperson of State Bank of India, disclosed that it took her decades to spot biases in her style of recruiting. In a recent interview, she told me how after a training programme at Salesforce, she realized that she had earlier succumbed to the common practice of asking men and women candidates different sets of questions. In Bhattacharya’s words, “For instance, I would ask [a woman candidate] about family, I would ask how old the children were, I would ask where they were, and ask how she would manage in case the job required a lot of travel. I realized I was not asking men about travel, I was not asking men about where their children were and how old they were."

India Inc has been trying to get its policies right. Its benefit programmes now include leave for maternity and paternity, even for adoption and parental care. The experience of the covid pandemic led a drive for a more empathetic work culture. All these are steps in the right direction. But knee-jerk moves also abound, especially in attempts to overcome decades of unfairness.

Gender, ethnicity and age discrimination are complex issues that cannot be resolved by hiring more diversely at the base level. Attrition while ascending the hierarchy must be guarded against. Companies ought to invest in systems that are designed to pay strategic attention to diversity.