Diversity in hiring

For some years I led technical recruitment at a small company, basically hiring sysadmins and programmers. While we were quite small and I am not in favor of quota systems or suchlike I hoped that we might nonetheless end up with a diverse group of employees. I took some action toward this: for instance, I would mail posters advertising vacancies out to historically black colleges and universities. To my disappointment there was a significant shortage of credible minority applicants getting even as far as initial interview. It's not a large sample size but I have to guess that whatever principally causes inequality in hiring might thus start at a rather earlier stage.

In the end every one of my hires was a young white male. The most-nearly-exceptions I can think of include,

• There was one middle-aged guy who unusually was largely hired on a probationary basis outside my process; he lasted a few weeks before we all agreed that he just didn't have what we needed.


• There was an older man, actually now deceased, to whom I took a liking, so I held on to his resumé, but at the time there was a clearly better candidate for the vacancy.


• There was a young Chinese chap where I may be guilty of some cultural insensitivity here: he got as far as in-person interview but I just couldn't get him to do anything other than agree with us and I was looking for people who think for themselves.


• There was one young white guy who has attention-deficit disorder whom I did hire. It seemed to work well enough to be sure to summarize any non-trivial instructions in followup e-mail.

So, I suppose, a couple of older white guys got close, and one young white guy with a kind of disability did get in but, for instance, no black female applicants were at all qualified, and goodness knows Columbus, OH, is a fairly diverse city, indeed I was friends with a black female student in the computer science program at the university.

I don't know what to make of that. I wonder if I was just unlucky in what fell across my desk. (Not that unlucky, a couple of our white guys were great hires.) Maybe there are more good minority candidates out there but (admittedly without any official mandate) I somehow failed to reach them.