Little support from HR managers for explicit diversity policies
HR managers and others involved in recruitment and selection are not very open to policies that explicitly focus on greater diversity, such as quotas or anonymous applications. They prefer less rigidly organised recruitment processes in which they retain a great deal of freedom to make their own decisions.
This is evident from a representative survey of 500 HR managers conducted by UvA sociologists Bram Lancee and Katharina Stückradt, in collaboration with Valentina di Stasio of the European University Institute. They published their findings this week in the latest edition of the scientific journal Social Science Research (see here for the abstract).
The study shows that HR managers prefer recruitment procedures that give them a lot of decision-making freedom. When asked about their preferences for certain recruitment measures, the participants in the study indicated that they particularly preferred unstructured and non-standardised selection procedures, in which they retain as much freedom as possible to make their own assessments. “But previous research shows that standardised and structured procedures actually help to reduce discrimination and increase diversity,” says Stückradt.
Small organisations
Structured measures such as anonymous job applications, preferential treatment in cases of equal suitability and, above all, quotas for women and ethnic minorities receive little support, particularly in smaller and informal organisations. Measures to promote diversity are more popular when they involve “soft” policies with little direct effect, such as attractive diversity missions or declarations of intent.
Strikingly, more than two-thirds of people with personnel responsibility believe that discrimination is not a problem in their organisation. “We know from previous research that discrimination in recruitment is actually very common in the Netherlands,” says Lancee. “It is therefore very unlikely that ethnic discrimination really does not play a role in all these organisations.”
Symbolic
According to the researchers, this limited recognition helps explain why support for corrective policies is so weak. “Even if people are in favour of diversity, it often remains just words. Support is usually symbolic and depends heavily on whether their own freedom of decision-making is compromised.” According to the researchers, organisations can only truly promote diversity by involving HR managers, who are responsible for implementing diversity policy in practice, in the design of that policy.
