smooth

Do you have a hard time believing that companies can't find qualified people from minority groups?

When a minority gets a job, or you don't get one, why the sudden blame on affirmative action? It sounded like you received a fair amount of financial help from your illustration above.

Why can't a company fill the 21 slots with the best people while still maintaining a high degree of integration. The person with a disability might even be better qualified than the person without one, but I received the impression from your post that you would attribute the highering decision solely to the external factor--the person could have disabilities and be the best qualified.

When people who hire others come on this board and start explaining how they are constantly forced to turn away the best candidates for sub-par ones, then I will believe such claims.

Otherwise, I don't know how the candidate (posters in this thread who feel they were treated unfairly) could even know why he or she was not hired. Every candidate I ever knew thought he or she deserved the job more than the person hired. It's not as if you think to yourself, oh yeah, that person really does deserve the job more than me.

It's also not as if you even know who actually gets the job. I've never received a call along the lines of, "oh yeah, we hired that guy sitting next to you in the lobby." I don't even know anyone who received a call along the lines of "we would like to hire you but we had to hire that guy sitting next to you in the lobby because of his race." I think that's a pretty unlikely scenario--but maybe someone actually experienced that.

I'm more inclined to believe that any hiring manager is more likely to use that as an excuse and isn't very likely to tell the person they aren't hiring anything, must less the backroom decision making in regards to who to hire.

Basically, I'll agree that some companies want a diverse pool of workers, but I suspect this occurs far more often due to internal desires rather than external government regulations. Even so, one shouldn't conclude that just because companies are dedicated to diversifying their employee pool they are then resorting to turning down better candidates just to fill those slots--they are most likely to be finding qualified minorities. Since they comprise a lower proportion of the population, companies might turn down qualified non-minorities while they continue looking. It doesn't particularly matter in the long run, since qualified non-minorities are probably all in line--so companies can afford to be patient and selective.

I also want to point out, as someone who has been in a position to hire others, that there is no real objective way to ensure qualification. If that were they case, we wouldn't need interviews. Your belief regarding your qualifications notwithstanding, employers might be looking for qualities that aren't published, or may even decide based on what was had for breakfast. The point is hiring, like school admissions and scholarship awards, are extremely subjective matters and rarely result in what outsiders think would be better choices. But that's the point, outsiders (as in, anyone here who wasn't hired by a company or wasn't given a loan, etc.) don't have any further connection with the company deciding and aren't privy to the reasons underlying the decision. They are just speculating--and that speculation is going to redirect the cause of the rejection to an external source that is blameworthy.

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