Is it biased in a bad way? It’s really hard to measure someone’s ability to do a job, especially for a more senior role. Therefore, I feel comfortable hiring people recommended to me by others that I trust.
To an audience of 98% white males.
The director acknowledged the incongruity, thankfully, but never solved the problem.
I know plenty of women in the industry, but for the specialty I would recommend for, I couldn’t list more than a couple of names (of which are well employed already).
Yet still, very few females apply. I had interviewed 100+ people for Google. Of them IIRC 8 were women and 1 was hired. You can't get more women into the profession if they choose not to apply.
And they can't apply if they never see your ad because of practices like the ones described in the article under discussion.
Another issue, with workplace politics and edicts being what they are, wouldn't white men be a better category of applicants to exclude via such targeting? I'm pretty sure this is happening as we speak. I don't view this as a problem, though, for the reason alluded to above: approximately nobody in tech lands jobs in response to ads.
That having been said, I fully agree that such targeting in job ads in particular should be illegal. I agree with this out of my own rational self interest, as a straight white male in my 40s. Other aforementioned types of gender, racial, and age discrimination should be made illegal as well.
I don’t see how an ad would be effective at all in this hiring climate. Yes, you might get something, but you would be unlikely to get a woman or underrepresented minority hire, even if they were specifically targeted. They have much better options than to answer these ads.
That's exactly what we did, with a modicum of success. The pickings are super slim, though. Most CS students don't really seem to give a shit about CS, meaning they don't do anything other than coursework, at all, and their coursework is pretty primitive, and uses Java which our company had no use for.
Another problem is when you go to career fairs, easily 9 out of 10 people coming to your booth will be looking for an internship rather than a job. This isn't a problem per se, if you're a large company this is actually pretty great. But I was hiring for a small (at the time) startup, so that was a bit of a waste of everyone's time. Still we landed a few diamonds in the rough after a few attempts. 8/10, would hire from local schools again.
Ironically, the most extensively qualified candidate I met at these career fairs was female. She was in grad school and had a resume you wouldn't believe if you'd seen it, and very obviously smart as a whip. She was, however, too smart to work for a startup. Can't say I blame her.
Probably in several ways, along with a gender bias in your network there's probably a high likelihood that there's a racial bias, a class/wealth bias and an age bias.
Your network probably has a strong contingent of people you went college with, people with a shared interested in your sports (which can be a proxy for class and race) and people with a similar background.
Let me start by inverting something that Uncle Bob has been saying for years: If you have less than 5 years experience, then 50% of the developers out there are 'older' from your perspective. Are half of your recommendations for people over 28?
Let's see how mine would stack up. If I had to recommend 10 people right now:
If I'm honest, about 6 of mine will be for people over the age of 28. That should be 5. So my recommendations are biased against young devs, which I hated when I was 26. If you asked me to be fair I could come up with 1 or 2 more young developers, but unbidden it would probably be 3-4.
2 or 3 would be female. If you only consider recent grads, that's low. But there's a hole in the older generation, so 25% is probably spot on, even though I think it kinda sucks.
2 should be black, hispanic or asian. I hit that number sort of. Because I could recommend 3 Indian developers and one East Asian from recent jobs. I have to my knowledge only ever worked with two black developers, one of whom was good, and also understandably frustrated that he is a statistic. I have seen him exactly once in 10 years.
I would wager that my numbers are better than most of the people who are getting rustled here (if you know your numbers are fine, you're likely not getting drawn into the conversation), but they're still biased. My recommendations don't make things better. They don't make them much worse, but they still tug the needle toward the unfair end of the gauge.