Looking for ‘cultural fit' in recruitment process = discrimination-by-design
The ‘cultural fit’ thing is the codeword for discrimination. This is how it happens.
Tech workers could be good at solving puzzles and ace interviews, but they are not good at solving real life conflict management or practicing healthy social behavior. So how do you make them work in groups and collaborate? Here comes the ‘cultural fitness' mantra. You put ‘similar’ people in a group so that they can work together and be productive. The goal of finding ‘cultural fitness’ is looking for ‘similar’ kinds of engineers. Did I say ‘similar’? Yes, that’s where discrimination starts.
When the process of looking for ‘cultural fitness’ is quite vague, there is plenty of room for accommodating one’s subconscious bias - this candidate is slow, this candidate didn’t look energetic, this candidate jumps into the problem without thinking through, or make up any vague superficial reasoning to reject the candidate . End result: white engineers are going to find ‘cultural fitness’ among white candidates, Indian engineers are going to find ‘cultural fitness’ among Indian candidates, Chinese candidates are going to find ‘cultural fitness’ among Chinese candidates, males engineers are going to reject female candidates for not being ‘cultural fit’, younger engineers are going to reject older candidates for not being ‘cultural fit’ - list goes on.
Facebook interview process has something called ‘behavioral interview’. You gotta ask yourself - is this guy psychologist or behavioral scientist? What behavior is going to be assessed in one-hour interview? Does he/she have any formal training to assess others' behavior? Nope, he is just another guy who stares the whole day at python code - not someone who is looking at people to understand their behavior. It’s not about doing objective assessment of the candidate's behavior. His job is to answer the question: is this candidate going to fit into one of the engineering teams?
In a nutshell, ‘cultural fitness’ is meant for *excluding* different kinds of people - be it black or female or latino or egyptian or russian or LGBTQ.
Make no mistake, almost all the jobs in this world require ‘cultural fitness’ - starting from janitorial works to astronauts. Military is a good example, where ‘cultural fitness’ is paramount. But the military interview process does not have a vague eight-hour interview process to find ‘cultural fit’. Their process is quite objective - height, weight, physical fitness, drug test, basic aptitude tests etc. There is no room for discrimination - at least in face value. But once you are recruited, their training process is going to make damn sure that you *become* ‘cultural fit’. The important word here is ‘become’ - you are not hired as ‘cultural fit’, you become ‘cultural fit’. If you still cannot become a ‘cultural fit’, you will be kicked out, or worse - you will leave yourself.
You gotta ask yourself, if Facebook is such a great place to work, why is ‘cultural fitness’ even a criteria in the hiring process? If a monkey is hired at Facebook, it should be able to go through ‘cultural fitness’ training, adapt to a great place of 'cultural fitness', collaborate with other engineers and pump out million lines of code within a month. Monkey *becomes* ‘cultural fit’.
It’s not that top management is not aware of this discriminatory process. They are quite smart and quite aware. But if such a discriminatory process can keep stock prices up, why bother to change it? Maintain status quo. However, as a public company, top management needs to show that they are not discriminating. Hence, some band-aids in the recruitment process - having a diversity group to review candidates. But this is a fig-leaf - not really aimed to fix discriminatory processes.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
