Yesterday I was talking to a manager in a large financial institution that has fully embraced all the guidelines and rules. His team has gays, lesbians, an appropriate quota of females and ethnic minorities and has decided that the next hire must be a white male.
Whatever happened to employing the most suitable person for the job?
The fact is that an extraordinary amount of time and effort is wasted by both the business and its recruitment agencies because of the hidden agenda and this is perhaps why most now seem to measure agency “success” on how many CV’s are put forward rather than the conversion rate of CV’s to job offers.
From a business perspective it makes no sense at all, as the old adage states a business is only as good as its employees so why would you choose to complicate things?
Employers are running scared of employment law – laws which were brought in with the best intentions to ensure equal opportunity for all -are now actively discriminating against the majority of job applicants so if you wondered why a job interview went well and yet no offer was forthcoming it might be purely because your face didn’t fit.
