Reprinted with permission © 2008 TreeTop Technologies

Sometimes hiring managers may miss the big picture when trying to meet requirements or expectations around affirmative action and equal opportunity, suggests Angela Whitford-Downing, who handles diversity and sexual harassment training for the State of Massachusetts Department of Transitional Assistance.

“It’s easy to get stuck on race and gender, but real diversity is about so much more than that,” she notes. “It’s about different socioeconomic or academic backgrounds. It’s about varied educational and professional experiences. It’s about different age levels and different outlooks. Race and gender are only part of the picture.”

Job descriptions can often help perpetuate lack of diversity, Whitford-Downing adds, because hiring managers, human resources professionals and recruiters may have preconceived notions about what kind of person would fill a role. For example, in trying to fill a programmer position, people tend to gravitate toward quiet, introverted people with long-standing experience in multiple programming languages—including those that aren’t used anymore. And they are often surprised when confronted with a candidate who is clearly an expert programmer yet is young, chatty and only experienced in more contemporary programming languages.

But even when hiring managers open themselves up to seeing diversity in a wider field than race and gender, Whitford-Downing indicates that it is easy to get tunnel vision by trying to make the entry-level workforce diverse and neglecting to have succession plans and promotion strategies that help ensure diversity throughout the entire workforce.

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Footnotes: From "View from the TreeTop" Volume 2 Issue 8 August 2008