Recruitment Gatekeeping Historically Excluded Talent
Recently, in one of Facebook’s oldest and most popular recruitment groups, a request from one of the administrators caught my attention for all the wrong reasons. “Please stop inviting people who have no indication of recruiting in their profiles,” the post read. Instead, members were to encourage these recruiting novices to apply on their own and indicate that they were transitioning or pivoting.
In response, there were several comments praising the directive. Members were “exhausted” by the number of candidates entering recruitment and wanted the space to be preserved for people with experience. Keep in mind, these are so-called “people” people, whose jobs often involve spotting talent in unlikely places – the exact work they’re complaining about. When it comes to filtering their own profession through the lens of DEI, there’s resistance.
Another instance by a Recruiter at Amazon and a so-called “DEI champion” told a 1st Gen Latina that she was “bastardizing the industry” and compared recruiting to being a doctor.
What’s most troubling, are the dynamics of the industry. Reports show that recruiters, interviewers, and hiring managers are overwhelmingly white and female. Many of the beginners pivoting into talent acquisition are Black and Latina women. Thus, on the surface, we have recruitment veterans demanding that new entrants pay their dues to access the industry’s most valued networks. But dig deeper and you see a pervasive bias around who’s best qualified to recruit. What I saw in that Facebook group wasn’t only an attempt to police a digital community – it was a prime example of gatekeeping at its worst.
The conundrum in recruitment is that qualifications are subjective, maybe more so than other fields of work. There are essential soft skills that candidates must have – avid curiosity, clear communication, adherence to deadlines, and relationship-building capacity, among them. But everything else – the recruitment tech stack, the best practices, compliance, the trends – can be taught. So, when recruitment incumbents make noise about newbies not having enough experience, what are they really discussing?
The applicants applying to Diversity Forward’s Recruitment Fellowship Program have master’s degrees and PhDs, yet they can’t catch a break. Our fellowship, an immersive 10-week experience, preps participants for a successful transition into the industry and was specifically designed to address the skills gap. Still, it’s worrying to think that “experience” is just code for others’ implicit biases, that the hurdle these women must overcome has nothing to do with professional competency.
It’s this sort of gatekeeping that limits the careers of the historically underrepresented across industries. We see it in literature and film, where Black stories are underfunded or scrutinized to a higher degree. It’s in finance, amongst the high-level executives who claim the talent pool for qualified diverse candidates is shallow. And right here, in the industry that has arguably the greatest influence when it comes to making workplaces more inclusive, the same gatekeeping has infected its ranks.
Our fellowship offers one path forward, by arming underrepresented women with everything they need to forge rewarding recruitment careers. But the transformative work of diversifying the recruiters shouldn’t fall exclusively on the shoulders of the excluded.
The powers that be must make space for the rising class. To lock them out, instead of mentoring, encouraging, and developing them, is lazy and hypocritical. If our industry is truly about investing in people, and if, as a collective, we’re bought into DEI, then it only makes sense to live our values through purposeful inclusion in recruitment itself. How can we right the wrongs in the startups and corporations that we represent if we perpetuate the very gatekeeping we’re meant to dismantle?
Diversity Forward is interested in collaborating with organizations that are committed to supporting up-and-coming talent. Please contact us at cohort@diversityforward.com to sponsor a fellow or provide paid externship.
Interested in getting training for your teams? info@diversityforward.com
Make room – in Facebook groups, on HR teams, in C-suites, across every industry. Diverse recruiting demands diverse recruiters; the work starts with us.
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