Diversity and Inclusion

Unpacking That Icky Feeling of 'Shopping' for Diverse Job Candidates

Many companies want to bring a wider variety of lived experiences to their workforces. However, research by Summer Jackson shows how hiring managers' fears of seeming transactional can ultimately undermine their diversity goals.

When companies try to hire employees from specific ethnic or racial backgrounds to meet their diversity, equity, and inclusion goals, an uncomfortable feeling often creeps into the process.

Particularly among well-intentioned white advocates, there can be a sense that HR is “shopping” for people from historically marginalized groups—even when the real goal is to create a more diverse workplace, because it’s both the right thing to do and good for business. New research by Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Summer Jackson gives a name to this feeling—“repugnant market concerns”—and offers new insight into the fluid dynamics in the growing and important space of diversity, equity, and inclusion, known as DEI.

It can make you feel like it's objectifying the people who are involved or exploiting them. It can lead to concerns that people might think you are not doing it for the right reasons.

“Oftentimes,” says Jackson, “the challenge is that you want to move quickly. You want to hire a lot of people and get a lot of quick wins. The nature of that can make it feel transactional, and when you're thinking about it within the context of DEI, it can make you feel repugnant. It can make you feel like it's objectifying the people who are involved or exploiting them. It can lead to concerns that people might think you are not doing it for the right reasons.”

Jackson spent 20 months embedded in the human resources division of a fast-growing tech company that she refers to by the pseudonym ShopCo. Her ethnographic study of the company, which was regarded as progressive and engaged in DEI, is detailed in a new paper in the September issue of Administrative Science Quarterly.

A progressive tech firm shuns a transactional platform

By all accounts, ShopCo was well positioned to succeed in its DEI initiatives, Jackson says. But the company still ran into challenges, particularly in increasing diversity among senior-level engineers in its technology department. To do this expeditiously, ShopCo considered 13 different recruitment platforms, some of them traditional, like Monster.com or Indeed, and others designed specifically to recruit high-quality candidates from racial minority groups.

Jackson observed that ShopCo leaders reacted with distaste to recruitment platforms in the second category that took a transactional approach, meaning that their stated goal was to help companies quickly hire qualified professionals from racial minorities. Traditional platforms, where the average candidate was white, that employed this same transactional approach did not elicit the same reaction. ShopCo leaders preferred, and ultimately adopted, only those diversity-specific platforms that used a more developmental approach, which, in addition to recruitment, provided candidates with training, networking, and mentorship opportunities.

Your timeline for promotion and development may not align with the candidates’ [timelines], so you could be developing and training people for someone else. They could leave your company before they become your senior manager.

"The leaders at ShopCo knew that these developmental platforms also offered networking opportunities for candidates on their platform, or helped with resume-writing, for example,” Jackson says. “So they felt like they were joining a community, as opposed to trying to quickly hire a Black person. They still hired them, but they feel less repugnant about it.”

Jackson theorizes that ShopCo’s decisions hurt the company’s ability to attract senior-level engineers, because the wraparound services provided by the more community-oriented platforms generally attracted more junior-level professionals.

“In hiring junior-level talent, you're overly reliant on your own internal labor markets to develop and promote those people,” Jackson advises. “And your timeline for promotion and development may not align with the candidates’ [timelines], so you could be developing and training people for someone else. They could leave your company before they become your senior manager.”

Look closely at what motivates candidates and HR

Had the ShopCo team members recognized and discussed their uncomfortable feelings as hindering the company’s DEI efforts, they might have made different decisions. “Make whatever decision you want,” says Jackson, “but make it consciously and not because you're driven there by these unconscious, unrecognized feelings.”

ShopCo also made assumptions about the job candidates using the various platforms, without seeking the input of the professionals themselves, Jackson says. “Companies that are trying to be thoughtful in their actions can overthink it sometimes,” she says. “They want to be so thoughtful about their interactions and their policies that they're making these inferences on behalf of Black and Latinx and Native American software engineers.”

I could imagine a context where people use this argument even though they don't really mean it, because they know it's the more morally licensed or acceptable way to get out of doing it.

Although adopting more transactional diversity-related recruitment platforms might seem like an easy fix, Jackson cautions against jumping to conclusions or taking a one-size-fits-all approach. She advises companies to challenge their own assumptions by gathering information directly from the groups they seek to engage and to examine the motivations of hiring managers.

At ShopCo, the repugnance felt by decision-makers was authentic, she says, whereas at other organizations, the same argument could be used to intentionally keep diversity at lower levels of an organization.

“These repugnant market concerns exist in many contexts,” says Jackson. “In some contexts, it'll be like ShopCo, where it was a genuinely felt moral handwringing over how to hire Black and Brown people without feeling like you're shopping for them … [But] I could imagine a context where people use this argument even though they don't really mean it, because they know it's the more morally licensed or acceptable way to get out of doing it.”

Overcoming the credibility deficit

In future research, Jackson plans to map the growing variety of DEI tools available to business leaders today. She also intends to delve further into the challenges facing white advocates who feel responsible for and try to personally overcome the credibility deficit they have with historically marginalized communities.

For the best chance at DEI success, Jackson advises that companies start emphasizing the value of diversity as early as possible.

“It’s hard to be a thousand-person company and then try to convince new employees that you care about DEI if you've never said anything about it before, and 90 percent of your employees are a single demographic,” she says.

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Image: iStock / Megaflopp

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