Should You Think Twice About Putting a Profile Picture on LinkedIn?
State Street's controversy over requiring permission to hire White men should be a warning about what information you allow potential employers to see
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It’s always been a practice to include a professional picture on your LinkedIn profile. Now, if you are a White male, the last thing you want employers to see is your skin color. Diversity and inclusion programs started with appropriate goals to ensure companies were free from racism and discrimination. Diversity, Inc is now a multi-billion-dollar industry that gives us questionable results while promoting things it was designed to prevent. Gender and Ethnic Studies majors now can rejoice because they finally have a lucrative field to work in.
State Street is one of the world’s largest investment firms and it got caught in a controversy over the weekend about its discriminatory hiring practices. It was reported that staff would require special permission to hire a White male candidate which the bank later said was “factually inaccurate.” However, the firm stood behind its race and gender quotas by stating they want to triple the number of Black, Asian, female, and other minority staff by 2023.
Jess McNicholas is the bank’s head of inclusion, diversity and corporate citizenship released a statement saying, “This is now front and central for State Street — it’s on every senior executive’s scorecard. All of our leaders have to demonstrate at their annual appraisals what they have done to improve female representation and the number of colleagues from ethnic-minority backgrounds." Executives face reduced bonuses if they don’t meet discriminatory and non-merit-based hiring targets.
Now, if you are a White male, the last thing you want employers to see is your skin color.
Recruiters have to go through the process of creating a diverse panel of at least four candidates that include a woman and minority to present to hiring managers. If you know anything about recruiting, it’s hard enough to find qualified candidates in a competitive market without worrying about melanin and gender requirements. State Street and other firms shouldn’t be allowed to call themselves equal opportunity employers if they have race and gender quotas in their hiring practices.
Self-proclaimed “progressives” are taking us back to a time before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 when there were similar illegal and immoral hiring practices. Title VII explicitly states discrimination based on certain specified characteristics: race, color, national origin, sex, and religion is prohibited and an employer may not discriminate with regard to any term, condition, or privilege of employment. White men are included in the legislation, but Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion departments conveniently ignore that with these initiatives.
State Street and other firms shouldn’t be allowed to call themselves equal opportunity employers if they have race and gender quotas in their hiring practices.
If you are a White male in the job market, the last thing you should want employers to see is a social media profile picture. Every major corporation with a DEI department has its own ideas of an ideal candidate that goes beyond merit, experience, and qualifications. You should want your resume to speak for itself and have your skin color unknown as long as possible. The next time I apply for a new job I will try to delay a video or in-person interview to only get judged on my resume.
Racial and gender quotas should be insults to minority and female candidates. Quotas and emphasis on immutable characteristics will raise questions about who gets jobs or promotions because everyone knows those are the preferred people who help the company reach arbitrary goals. If the best person was the diverse candidate, it’s unfair to them since people could think they got hired because of factors besides their merit. HR departments fail to realize skin color doesn’t automatically confer expertise.
Diverse workplaces are a good thing. The problem is only one kind of diversity gets considered. If diversity only goes skin deep, then you don’t have a diverse workplace. There’s nothing diverse about having a group of women or people of certain skin colors if they all think alike. Unfortunately, it’s more important for corporations to virtue signal with their race and gender numbers than to hire the best people. Companies rightfully eliminated one form of bigotry in the 20th century against minorities and women for another kind in the 21st century.