If applications have diversity goals, and ask for your demographic, how can they claim that your response won’t subject you to adverse treatment/ affect your application? Aren’t your demographics taken into direct consideration when targeting those diversity goals, either for better or worse?
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It’s for government reporting requirements in most cases. From what I’ve seen with applicant tracking systems, I cannot see the answers to those questions when reviewing their profile/resume. It might be somewhere else but it’s not something I can see or factor in when deciding who to interview.
Obviously it depends on the specific circumstance. But in general, the “correct” way to do this is that the data is gathered, is *not* used at hiring time, but then *is* analyzed retroactively – e.g. “over the last six months, what was our hiring ratio by gender?”. They use that analysis to determine whether there are potential biases that need to be corrected; if they identify a bias, they work on finding its cause and resolving it.
The demographic questions aren’t for making hiring decisions; they’re for analysing later to see if the hiring process is biased. An unbiased process should result in hiring demographics that match the general population; if they don’t match, you can start investigating why.
Employers should use it to inform their recruiting efforts, not base hiring decisions on. If they are focused or diversity, they can see if they are getting applicants from diverse populations or only from a few and then modify efforts to get a wider variety of applicants. They also use it to report later on diversity of staff that are employed.
Please know in any decent company, your data isn’t all distributed to the hiring authority. So when you enter that you are 35, white, male with a bachelor’s born in the U.S, the only information the hiring team gets is bachelor’s degree. Then they get your documents that you upload that are relevant, like resumes/CV, cover letter, proof of degree, etc. The other information is stored so that non-connected later reports can be run on the population of hired people. This way, the company has hiring statistics, but they aren’t factored in immediate hiring considerations.
If hiring has diversity goals, then it can negatively affect you. This would be something HR does when presenting resumes to the hiring manager when there’s an abundance of applications. They may select a few strong candidates from the entire pool then a candidate or 2 from the diverse pile.
It could also mean recruiters focus their efforts on reaching out to diverse groups to find candidates, but this is more rare.
After this stage, the diversity effort usually stops and the hiring manager(s) selects the best fit from the pool of candidates HR passed over to them.
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