> Which job fairs do your company reps attend?
Are job fairs still a thing? IME most recruitment happens online these days, with the vast majority of candidates coming in via LinkedIn and other job boards.
> Can employees recommend a friend as a potential recruit? What effect does that have on promoting favoritism over a better candidate?
Why is that a bad thing? Personal recommendations from someone you trust is a valid factor in making a hiring decision. This doesn't necessarily mean hiring someone who is inexperienced and not a good fit for the role over a better candidate just because they were recommended, but all else being equal, a recommendation is a strong signal to consider.
Although, truthfully, why is favoritism wrong? If a company prefers hiring someone based on a recommendation, they might have issues with their performance, but maybe that person makes the team happier and more productive. Ultimately, it's their decision to make and live with.
> If the core team is all from Local Church, and their friend network is all from Local Church, then should they favor that network to hire someone else from Local Church, or should other candidates be judged with equal weight?
I think we can agree that candidates should be judged equally based primarily on their ability to fulfill the role requirements. My problem with DEI initiatives is that they emphasize superficial traits like religion, race, gender, ethnicity, etc., which are things we've fought hard to _not_ pay attention to in a professional setting. The effect of this is that it simply reverses the direction of the discrimination, but it doesn't get rid of it.
> Bearing the latter in mind is DEI.
> Requiring new candidates to not be fro Local Church is also discrimination on the basis of religion, and is equally prohibited. It is not DEI.
You can define what DEI is supposed to mean all you want, but the reality is that companies use it as an excuse for discrimination[1]. This is not surprising, as it's a slippery slope from "suppressing our biases" to "reversing our biases".
I said "primarily" above because there is inevitably a human component in deciding whether a person or team would want to work with someone, which can be interpreted as a bias. This is often referred to with vague terms such as "culture fit", or the rebranded "cultural contribution", "values fit", etc.[2]
The thing is that humans are innately tribal. We tend to favor like-minded individuals familiar to our own background and life experience. Even if you educate people to not be biased against/for a specific set of traits, we will still be biased against some others. Humans in general favor attractive, charismatic, confident and outgoing people. Should we fight to remove those biases as well?
In broader terms, what is exactly the end goal of DEI programs? That companies are 100% heterogeneous across all possible criteria that can identify a person? This is insane and unrealistic. It completely ignores not only our inherent biases, but the fact that some of our traits influence our career decisions and make us better suited for specific roles. For example, nurses are overwhelmingly female, while mechanics and electricians are overwhelmingly male[3]. Is this the result of discrimination in these industries, or simply a side-effect of what makes us different? Would these industries be any better if we forced them to discriminate against the majority of their work force?
[1]: https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/09/ibm_red_hat_discrimin...
[2]: https://buffer.com/resources/culture-fit/
[3]: https://careersmart.org.uk/occupations/equality/which-jobs-d...