A friend of mine has been interviewing for data analyst roles but hasn't been able to clear them. She's in a minority category so she gets the feeling that she's being interviewed just so that the teams interviewing her can show that they have interviewed all classes of people for this role before hiring the candidate they really wanted. How can she detect that something like this is happening since she's poring 100% of herself in each interview.
Are you implying that the firms interviewing him/her/they had no intention to hire your friend? Does your friend believe they did not get a fair shot in the interview?
A number of companies follow the Rooney Rule: you are required to interview minority candidates before making a hiring decision. But for hard tech positions where you must clear a hard technical bar, desperate recruiters may line up relatively underqualified minority candidates anyway in strict adherence to the rule. Nothing against minority engineers, but the truly qualified are in high demand and rare because, ahem, they are a statistical minority. So if you are a second or third rung business without the prestige to attract those rare engineers, you just go through the motions with whatever candidates you find. This serves neither side well, but is valuable virtue signalling.
@blackrock yes based on the fact that almost every time she's told that they picked another candidate or the hiring manager closed the role etc... (This has happened at least 10 times now).
There's nothing to detect, many tech companies are doing diversity interviewing, that's the norm now.
So you’re saying your friend is under-qualified but got an interview anyway? Tech companies are so desperate for talent that if you do well in the interview they’ll give you an offer. In addition, tech employee’s time is valuable: you wouldn’t want to waste people’s time interviewing someone all day just so you can reject them.
This can hardly be generalized
Don’t see how your comment is in any way applicable. Interviewing someone with the sole intention of rejecting them is a terrible business decision and extremely costly. Either the company is dumb or the person is imagining.
Ask them about their diversity stats - see how they respond to that question.
Wait aren’t minorities have no less advantages when it comes to hard tech jobs? East and south Asians especially. I’m East Asian and a data analyst too. I don’t get this impression. At the end of the day monitory or not it all comes down to how well you can do your job. Ask her to stop worrying about this and just focus on honing on her interview and actual analytical skills.
Minority as in black/Mexican/women
Does she have friends that can spell pouring ?
I would have your friend use LinkedIn and try to network with people in her desired company/team. That way you have internal folk to vouch for her. What may happen is there’s roles companies have “open” but really aren’t. They know who they’re giving it to (ex: someone internal) but they put it up to CYA. I know this as my company has done that. It wasn’t a racial/sex thing through.
I believe I've experienced this many times. I like to ask the recruiters about other candidates for the role and where they are in the process. If I find out I'm being brought in at the end, I don't bother to go because they have likely already made a decision and are bringing you in to say they interviewed diverse candidates... It's not like they pay for your time that day.
So true. It's laugh cry funny how these things companies do to 'improve' diversity (i.e. just pr, not actual effort) just end up hurting diverse candidates (i.e. wasting their time).
No advice on how to avoid this but I agree it does happen. I’ve heard hiring managers talk about bringing in a minority for an all day interview. They already know who they’re going to hire but think they’re doing the minority a favor to interview her.
They're just wasting their and her time. I wish this would stop. This is even worse than being sexist.
Your friend is getting interviews more easily and she wants to stop??
Yes, because they’re not going to hire her if she’s a token. She wants to do interviews where they’ll actually hire her.