Was I Hired for the Wrong Reason?
When the colour of your skin does your job for you
On nearly every job application I’ve ever filled out, there was a little box to check if you are a minority or a person of colour.
As a young brown kid, I used to love seeing that. It meant they might be looking for a quota to fill and guess who could fill it!
Things changed as I grew older and had trouble getting jobs that didn’t have this checkbox.
First, I began to wonder if I was not being hired because of the colour of my skin.
And then, I began to wonder if the only reason I was ever hired was because of the colour of my skin.
An understandable dilemma
With all the racism in the world, especially before my time, it is easy to understand why some people would think a quota is necessary.
Businesses and people wanted to show the world they weren’t one of the racist ones.
The problem is it takes away the merit of getting hired.
Ironically, I still had to use my French last name on my resume instead of my Indian one. If I used the Indian one, I wouldn’t get a callback.
People wanted to hit a quota but perhaps still had some racism in them.
While I was concerned I wasn’t getting hired because people were racist, I was also only getting hired because people were trying to prove they weren’t racist.
Don’t get me wrong, I was always happy to get a job.
But, recently I realized I only ever got jobs where I checked that box or knew someone working there.
So, was I really the best candidate? Was I ever the best candidate?
That’s a question that will haunt the best of us.
And, a question that could kill your confidence if you knew the answer.
If you ask me, it seems like forcing people to meet a quota is the wrong solution to an old problem.
It might be the wrong solution
Forcing businesses to meet a race quota seems like solving racism with racism.
Instead of teaching people to simply hire the best candidates, we now force them to look at the colour of their skin (or many other qualifiers).
It’s not easy to knock the racism out of someone, but that should be up to the business to hold hiring managers accountable and to set proper hiring standards.
It doesn’t seem like this solution is in the best interest of businesses or individuals.
Those who are hired for the colour of their skin don’t ever have to rise up to the standard it would take to get hired if it was a level playing field.
And, businesses don’t get the best candidates.
It’s a lose-lose.
It’s a lose-lose-lose if you count the lost productivity in society too.
What is the right solution?
Aside from having merit-based hiring practices and ensuring the right people are in charge, it can be hard to come up with solutions to the racism problem.
I would be the first to argue that people are much less racist and that this is a much more rare problem to begin with.
At my restaurant, we only hire who we feel are the best candidates and we ended up heavily multi-cultural because of that.
We have staff from Italy, China, Albania, Ukraine, Russia, and numerous other places. When you hire based on merit for multiple positions in a multicultural country the result is a diverse staff.
So, should we be forcing people to hire based on quotas or purely on who is the best candidate?
In the end, those who hire based on proving they aren’t racist or don’t hire because of someone’s race are worse off.
They lose by paying attention to colour.
The individual who will have experienced racism is far better off in a merit-based system too.
They’ll end up getting hired by a company with merit-based hiring practices meaning the company has the strongest team and a better company to work for.
Closing thoughts
As a person of colour, I believe being hired for the colour of your skin is almost as bad as not being hired because of it.
Forcing people to hire candidates based on the colour of their skin is a bad solution. It forces people to look at race which prevents everyone from experiencing equality - which should be the goal in the first place.
We want equal opportunities and we want to know we earned the reward.
Handouts are only good for so long.
Thanks for reading.