Affirmative action in hiring is more controversial than it has to be because of the way it is typically framed. People who agree with the general motivation object to specific implementations like racial preferences and quotas because of their blunt nature.
Any affirmative action hiring policy entails a compromise because it mandates a distortion away from the employer’s unconstrained optimal practice. We should look for ways that achieve the goals of affirmative action but with minimal distortions.
One simple idea is turn away from policies that incentivize hiring and instead incentivize search. Suppose that the employer believes that 10% of all candidates are qualified for the job but that only 5% of all minorities are qualified. Imposing a quota on the number of minority hires is less flexible than a quota on the number of minorities interviewed.
Requiring the employer to interview twice as many minority candidates equalizes the probability that the most qualified candidate is a minority or non-minority. Across all employers using this policy, the fraction of minority employees will hit the target. But each individual employer is free to hire the most qualified candidate among the candidates identified so the allocation of workers is more efficient than would be achieved with a straight hiring quota.
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May 12, 2010 at 8:57 am
Jason
How about we rather let people be free to choose who they interview and hire. If they’re racists, or racial preferencers, then that’s their own loss. But at least we never scrapped freedom so that we could try and be “fair.”
May 12, 2010 at 9:38 am
Tim Johnson
The NFL mandates that teams with head coaching vacancies interview a certain number of minority candidates. The problem, though, is that a lot of the interviews are for show because the teams already know who their head coach will be before the interview process even begins. The NBA doesn’t have this kind of problem, probably because the majority of former players (who usually become coaches) are black.
May 12, 2010 at 9:57 am
AC
If you increase search beyond your “usual parameters,” you pretty much end up having to change your methodology for selecting candidates, since the candidates you dredge up from unusual searching are likely to be different than your normal pool, and you need to change your criteria in response.
May 12, 2010 at 9:59 am
pll
Having gone through the recruiting process on the employer end several times, I will say that the proposal of intensity in the search won’t work in many settings: the proportions of applicants might be simply too uneven. As a matter of fact, you don’t know the race of an applicant until you interview the applicant and there is generally at least one pre screening round to select the best prospects and weed out unqualified ones on the basis of their resume and cover letter. Yes, I’m aware that sometimes names provide a cue about race, but that is not as frequent; even less likely is to find two equally qualified candidates that only differ in the ‘racial signal’ of their name.
So, while affirmative action policies are less than efficient, I’m all for them. At the very minimum, it changes the conversation and forces individuals to at least attempt to be cognizant of biases. Contrast with the job market in other countries, where racism creeps in not so subtle ways. For example, in Peru, a frequent addition in job postings is the requirement of ‘buena presencia’… good presence… in practice this translates to a given racial profile. It is not unusual to see white college dropouts being selected over people who are objectively more qualified. You can glean something similar in Singapore.
Freedom to be racists leads to reinforce social outcomes that many find undesirable and that are very likely not optimal.
May 12, 2010 at 12:18 pm
Eran
I don’t understand the mechanism of your proposal: Who decides what the employer believes about qualification rates ? if the employer announces them in advance, does it commit to anything ? Also, what does it mean `interview twice as many minority candidates’ — twice as many as what ? their proportion in the pool of candidates ? their proportion in the population ?
But regardless of the mechanics, I think your proposal misses the mark. You seem to have in mind a situation in which the society gains from diversity and so has to incentivize employers who are optimizing a different utility function to reach that goal. But I think the controversy over affirmative action in recent years is elsewhere. In incidences and policies such as ricci v. dstefano or the michigan civil rights initiative, the public employers are the ones that gain, or claim to gain, utility from diversity, and they are discriminating against non-minorities to achieve that goal. So I think the question at the core of the controversy is not which incentives to give public employers to encourage them to achieve more diversity, but which restrictions over racial discrimination to put on their process in their effort to achieve that goal.
May 12, 2010 at 2:55 pm
Sean
Couldn’t help but relate this post to a new article in the NYT (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/nyregion/13frisk.html?hp). The lead sentence: “Blacks and Latinos were nine times as likely as whites to be stopped by the police in New York City in 2009, but no more likely to actually be arrested.” Assuming that police are not stopping people completely at random (conditional on race), it seems as though this should be a result that is trumpeted rather than disparaged.
May 12, 2010 at 3:28 pm
Matt
The NFL’s “Rooney Rule” forces a team searching for a new head coach to interview at least one minority candidate. It isn’t just a lame duck rule either, as the example of Mike Tomlin’s hiring by the Steelers shows. Apparently he was flown in as a longshot to get the job, but his interview was so unexpectedly spectacular that he got it.
May 12, 2010 at 5:04 pm
Alicia
There is a cost to the applicant to attend an interview. Particularly if you must take time away from a current job. So to be interviewed when the hiring managers know you are underqualified based on resume is not a favor. You are probably taking a vacation day or an unpaid leave day and possioble signalling to your current employer that you are not a dedicated employee. If you have no shot at the job this does you a strong diservice.