According to a report released in November by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), African American and Hispanic workers were hit particularly hard during the first year of the current recession. The report notes that while “the overall labor market conditions deteriorated markedly in 2008 following the onset of the recession in December 2007 . . . labor market problems for blacks or African Americans and Hispanics or Latinos were especially acute.”
In 2008, the BLS reported that the unemployment rate was 10.1 percent for blacks and 7.6 percent for Hispanics. These figures were considerably higher than the unemployment rates for whites and Asians, at 5.2 percent and 4.0 percent, respectively. During the first 10 months of 2009, the unemployment rate for black male college graduates 25 and older was 8.4 percent — compared with 4.4 percent for white male college graduates.
According to an article by the New York Times, that incongruity is driving many college-educated black males to “scrub” their resumes of “any details that might tip off” a potential employer to their race. One job hunter deleted a reference to an association for African-American business students while another eliminated his middle name (Jabbar) from his resume altogether.
One Yale-educated out-of-work African-American man commented to the Times, “You even worry that the hiring manager may not be as interested in diversity as the HR manager or upper management.”
To ensure that your hiring managers aren’t passing up quality applicants because of their race, you must make them accountable. Accountability is important to ensure the success of your efforts to diversify your workforce. Managers, supervisors, and HR personnel should be made responsible for that success. Link managers’ performance evaluations and compensation with the results of their efforts to recruit and hire a diverse workforce.
For example, you might modify your evaluation forms to include several measures of diversity performance, including compliance with equal employment opportunity policies and attaining recruiting and promotion goals. You also might consider rewarding managers, supervisors, and HR personnel for their efforts and successes. Of course, you shouldn’t hire employees for the sole purpose of creating a diverse workforce — doing that could subject your company to an increased risk of reverse discrimination litigation.
One positive aspect of the current recession for employers is that there are more quality applicants than ever who want to work for you. Forgetting all the legal implications (and there are plenty), you should make sure your hiring mangers don’t pass over applicants because of their race because they are doing your company and workforce a severe injustice. Dismissing an applicant by race could mean you miss out on the employee who comes up with your next (or first) million dollar idea or eventually works her way up the ladder to lead the company into the future.
Will we ever get past this issue of race discrimination? On the face of it, it is so obviously ridiculous to make any type of decision, business or personal, based on the color of someone’s skin. I know that it happens every day, though.
We whites had better straighten up. The Hispanic population in this country is growing by leaps and bounds and I wonder what our world will look like when the power shifts. Hopefully, the U.S. will be a kinder, more family-oriented place.