Dr John Sullivan Talent Management Thought Leadership
A think piece… of arguments that challenge the popular view.
Recruiters love to help, so without giving it a second thought and without formal approval, some regularly provide a hiring preference to candidates from underdog or disadvantaged groups that frequently struggle to get a good job.
However, in the interest of fairness for those few recruiters who are open to hearing the counter arguments against this practice. This article lists the business and recruiting arguments against the emotional practice of purposely increasing the hiring of struggling group members. The struggling groups to target are chosen by the company. And each group is named after the primary cause of its members’ struggle (i.e., single parents, the laid off, the disabled, the neurodivergent, veterans, those with drug issues, the long-term unemployed, and ex-offenders).
A Hiring Preference For Candidates From Struggling Groups Explained
When you give a candidate from a struggling group a hiring preference, their employment opportunity moves up to “beyond equal” because of two things. First, the job requirements for the job they applied for would have been arbitrarily lowered or waived for this candidate. Second, the candidate’s ranking in the hiring queue would have been artificially raised or “boosted” because they fit into one of your predetermined “struggling groups.”
However, individual recruiters and companies that provide any hiring preference must realize that no law supports this practice. Each and every time, you provide a “beyond equal” opportunity, the recruiter and the company are both potentially opening themselves up to legal and union challenges.
The Arguments Against Allowing A Hiring Preference For Members Of Struggling Groups
In order to make a compelling business case that effectively sells your executives on making this practice an official company policy. Your arguments must overcome executive concerns over this practice’s potential negative impacts on your recruiting and business results. I will start with the arguments covering its potential damaging impacts on recruiting.
Part I – Recruiting Impacts – Arguments covering its damaging impact on recruiting
There are several arguments supporting the probability that this hiring preference will negatively impact your recruiting results. And by not providing it, your company may gain a competitive recruiting advantage. The recruiting arguments against this practice include:
- The boosted hires may have a higher failure rate – because some struggling candidates won’t be able to meet all of the qualifications. And in order to give them a new job opportunity. Some of the job requirements may have to be modified or waived. For example, women candidates often have less work experience. So, as part of this hiring preference, that experience requirement may need to be lowered. And taken together, the combination of all of these lowered qualifications. It will likely increase the chances that your boosted candidates will fail on the job.
- This preference may hurt your ability to fill mission-critical positions (like AI) – in today’s corporate world, which is highly dependent on a handful of technology areas like AI, machine learning, data security, and Quantum Computing. A corporation won’t likely be able to meet its strategic business goals unless its recruiting function gives its undivided attention to filling jobs in these mission-critical areas. That means simultaneously trying to hire struggling candidates will distract from the more important strategic goal.
- Giving a preference may increase turnover among your team’s top performers – in many cases, top performers remain top performers over the long term, by making sure that they are surrounded by other high performers. So when their team adds members for reasons other than their performance level, your top performers will definitely notice it. And that may mean that this preference may reduce the retention rate of your top performers. And that higher turnover will force your recruiting function to do additional costly recruiting
- Without a written policy against it, this hiring practice will likely continue informally – because so many recruiters have a soft spot towards those in the struggling groups. Only a formal written policy will prevent this practice from continuing informally. And without a policy, no one will be tracking its usage. So the damage that this informal practice can cause will continue.
- The bad habit of using non-job-related hiring factors will likely spread – of course, the best hiring processes exclusively use proven job-related factors that correlate with high job performance. So, it is a major mistake to get into the habit of adding any new non-job-related selection factors (like being a single mom) to boost the ranking of a candidate. Over time, many additional non-job-related factors will likely creep into use.
Because this hiring preference can lead to weaker recruiting results. It’s important to know that nearly 30% of TAs report that weak recruiting results have slowed sales or compromised product quality, leading to project delays and lower business performance.
Part II – Business impacts -Arguments covering the damaging business impacts of this preference
We know from established BCG research that of all the subfunctions within HR. Recruiting produces the highest business impacts (a 3.5x higher revenue impact and a 2x higher profit impact). So it’s easy to see how the waving of some qualifications and/or considering outside of work factors (like being a working mom) may damage your business results and hurt your bottom line. The arguments covering these negative business impacts of this practice include:
- If the boosting is widespread, it will impact your productivity and profit – often, the boost that you provide to struggling candidates includes the waiving of some of the job qualifications. And if, over time, you waive enough of these job requirements. You will end up with lower-performing new hires and many underperforming teams. And if this practice becomes widespread. Eventually, that reduction in productivity will lead to lower worker output, unhappy customers, and eventually, even a lower profit and stock price.
- Some boosted new hires will require additional management attention – because their outside-of-work situation may require additional management attention. For example, boosted new hires with drug-related issues may require more observation and manager understanding. And boosted single parents may require more than average flexibility in their work scheduling and attendance. Many caregivers simply won’t be available to work additional overtime. Finally, many boosted new hires that have been out of work for a while will require expensive additional training and manager support, if they are to get up to speed quickly.
- Realize that community support is already provided by other dedicated internal functions – helping the community is not a primary goal of the recruiting function. Although, no one else can recruit as effectively. There are, however, several other internal functions that are specifically charged with the community support role. For example, corporations already boost the community by paying taxes and wages and providing employee healthcare. Corporations also help their community by buying many of its supplies locally and through gifts from their foundation. And if the recruiting function wants to provide a direct community service. Instead, it should offer job search information and advice. That means that unless recruiting is specifically asked to provide it. It should leave the community support role to others who are more qualified to provide it.
- Having more coworkers with outside responsibilities may impact the team – many don’t like to openly acknowledge the fact that some of the members of these struggling groups have difficulty getting and keeping jobs. At least partially, because of their unavoidable outside-of-work responsibilities like parenting, caregiving, and volunteer work. And these outside responsibilities can mean that some boosted new hires will be more frequently distracted by outside-of-work emergencies. Meanwhile, other boosted employees won’t be as interested in a promotion or as available for overtime work. So hiring managers and executives must take into account that these outside-of-work responsibilities will sometimes also have an impact on their coworkers.
Equal Opportunity Must Still Be Provided In All Cases
There is no human right to work at a specific company. However, this article contains arguments that cover when a company voluntarily decides to give a preference to members of struggling groups.
The reader should note that nothing in this article is intended to imply that there are any situations in which a recruiter can ever avoid providing equal employment opportunity to all fully qualified candidates, regardless of whether they might also be classified as “struggling to find a job” candidates.
Final Thoughts
While putting together these counterarguments, I, of course, realized that this topic has generated a great deal of controversy in the past. And that I would receive a landslide of comments, that many would call hate mail. But despite that possibility, it is still my contention that whenever a preference is given to a member of a struggling group, that preference should be provided under an approved written policy.
Thank you for reading and sharing this information.
Notes for the reader
This is the latest article from Dr. Sullivan, who was called “the Michael Jordan of Hiring” by Fast Company.
You can subscribe to Dr. Sullivan’s weekly Talent Management articles here or by following him on LinkedIn.
