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| OMG! That's gotta hurt! |
While watching ABC's 'What Would You Do?' on Friday 4 February 2011, a terrible thing happened - HR got a seriously ugly black eye. I mean seriously ugly.
If you don't know the premise of this John Quiñones-hosted series, it's this: Quiñones and his team come up with a scenario and then go out and make it happen. Using actors and some fairly elaborate ruses, they create morally/ethically challenging situations to test unsuspecting people and see what they would do. According to Quinones' promo, they're trying to ascertain whether onlookers will "step in, step up or step away".
On Friday last, one test scenario was that of a coffee shop manager looking for a kitchen employee. The test arose when the candidate seeking the position was deaf. Bear in mind that the position was for kitchen help, but once it became clear that the two young women were hearing impaired, the manager was clear in his message: you can fill out the application form but it won't matter, I'm not hiring you.
At three different points during the 'experiment', HR practitioners witnessed the exchange between the coffee shop manager and the prospective applicant. I am shocked, appalled, horrified (is that tongue-in-cheek?) to report that they offered tips and tricks to the manager as to how he could discriminate and not get caught. Discrimination best practices perhaps?
It is not my intent here to judge HR in general, but I do have some pretty strong opinions about these three 'practitioners' in particular. Given my own professional situation, it might best not to say anything too negative, but this does give one pause doesn't it? One of the HR experts offered the pithy comment that "these people have more rights than.....". ['these people'? Surely, you jest?] Another of the HR officers suggested that a better way to handle the situation was to accept the application and simply write on the back "Not a fit". That was her expert opinion. Sigh.
If that is the quality of HR advice some managers are getting, is it any wonder that so many over-40s are unemployed? Is it any wonder that so many qualified people who aren't mainstream - i.e. differently abled, differently nationalitied, differently ethnicitied - are out of work? I don't begin to suggest that discriminatory practices are the only reason folk are out of work, but I do mean to suggest that a clear-eyed (as opposed to jaundiced-eyed) look needs to be taken at hiring practices. The fact that an organization can't be successfully taken to court for its behavior is not a good enough reason to keep doing something that is known to be both illegal and immoral.
Perhaps HR folk need to stop worrying about what can be proven in the court of law and need to start worrying about what can be proved in the higher court of morality and ethics (aka going to sleep at night). Seriously though, this is so not the way to winning the future. The business environment is so cut throat, so fraught with pitfalls and challenges that really, HR needs to be seeking and hiring the best candidate who has the goods to deliver in a given job. If that means hiring a deaf woman to wash your damn dishes then so be it. Can she wash the damn dishes? OK then hire her to wash the damn dishes.
Discriminating (or giving tacit approval to hiring managers' discrimination) is not the way to a prosperous future. I don't know much, but I know that for sure.
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