Posted on 12/04/2009 7:19:44 AM PST by Erik Latranyi
Johnny R. Williams, 30, would appear to be an unlikely person to have to fret about the impact of race on his job search, with companies like JPMorgan Chase and an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago on his résumé.
Barry Jabbar Sykes goes by Barry J. Sykes in his job hunt.
But after graduating from business school last year and not having much success garnering interviews, he decided to retool his résumé, scrubbing it of any details that might tip off his skin color. His membership, for instance, in the African-American business students association? Deleted.
“If they’re going to X me,” Mr. Williams said, “I’d like to at least get in the door first.”
Similarly, Barry Jabbar Sykes, 37, who has a degree in mathematics from Morehouse College, a historically black college in Atlanta, now uses Barry J. Sykes in his continuing search for an information technology position, even though he has gone by Jabbar his whole life.
“Barry sounds like I could be from Ireland,” he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
If you think it's difficult at 45, try it at 55. There's a hip new way of saying you're overqualified, and I've heard it more than once:
"Your resume's too strong."
My response? "Show me where I need to dumb it down."
Crickets chirp uncomfortably, followed by, "it was a pleasure meeting with you."
The last time I interviewed candidates for an engineering job, the two best were a white guy and a Turkish woman. The woman had the edge technically, while the guy was hungrier and more aggressive. Either would have been a good choice - until the crash came.
My first choice for a designer was a black guy. He had the best experience, even though he came from a “traditionally black college”. For my purposes, they had a good program. I know I’ve seen a hell of a lot worse.
Both the black designer candidate and the female engineering candidate have recently been in contact. I’m hoping for an improvement in business conditions to allow me to hire either.
Names wouldn’t put me off. An inabilty to speak English, an obvious racist attitude or a history of unattractive activism would.
I wouldn't object to the candidate being black, but I would wonder why he felt the need to segregate himself from the other business students. Yes, membership in an organization such as this could be a red flag that you have a bigot on your hands.
For the record, I wouldn't hire a member of the Aryan Business Students Association either.
Or ACORN.
I graduated from the University of Chicago - when I was there it still held very high standards but it still had its carefully nurtured quota of hard lefties - it has always been so. Example: the recent Alumni magazine included a 1946 (yes, that was 63 years ago) female graduate of the University raging on about those nasty old ‘teabaggers’ that pick on the big 0. She was apparently very familiar with the term in its crude colloquial sense.
From the general tone communicated in the Alumni magazine, my impression is that the University student body is desperately scrambling to join the Ivy League-rs (Princeton, Harvard, Yale, etc.) and the socialist wanna-bes at UC-Berkeley and Duke at the very bottom of the intellectual pile.
all the government interference in the labor market increases the risks in hiring minorities. You almost hope you don’t get a resume from a minority, and if you do it goes straight to the shredder (”which resume? What are you talking about?”)
Sounds like you are not familiar with OFCCP. It is a Dept. of Labor standard that requires you to retain ALL job applications, keep detailed records by RACE, and be prepared to document which candidates where interviewed/considered by RACE and ultimately hired by RACE. This info is subject to reporting to the Federal Govt. and they can come and inspect your files at any time.
For example, if you hired an engineer, you would have to document that you received 155 applications, 44 of which were blacks, 59 femaile, 21 Hispanic, 12 Asian, etc. You would have to indicate that you selected 20 for interview: 9 white, 6 black, 2 Hispanic, 3 Asian, 5 Female. You would then justify why you chose to hire the one you did (particularly if a white male)
First they forced this onto Federal contractors, then onto anybody who got TARP or bailout money. Coming to the rest of us soon...
Thomas Sowell long ago pointed out that affirmative action and civil rights laws tend to create disincentives to hiring minorities. In the aggregate, the educational credentials of minorities are inflated by easy admissions and grading under affirmative action, and every minority employee represents a potential civil rights claim. In a down economy, these hiring disincentives tend to be more consequential.
Yet another reason not to take TARP money.
..and what everybody seems to ignore, are the social implications of the social experiment.
30 years after these requirements are in effect, the dynamics of free enterprise now have responded.
The high quality people who weren’t previously hired because they didn’t fit the minority status, didn’t just die.
Instead a whole new industry of ‘Minority Subcontractors’ have emerged, with the firms essentially being operated and maintained by whites and some minorities who have learned the system, and have tooled up to compete by those new criterion for other contracts.
The only problem is that those factors aren’t the ones favoring quality, so the entire industry is lowered in standards and in future capacity to grow because their future associations are still geared towards those quotas.
IMHO, these artificial constraints have done more damage to American Integrity than improve any social ill.
Actually, he is right, but for the wrong reason. Corporate HR departments are far less concerned with race, than with homogeneity in everything else. They don’t want personality, or personal distinction, or creativity, they want generic hires.
They want everyone to wear the same suits, to be about the same age, to have the same boring names, to not be too tall or too short, or too fat, or too ugly, or have unusual facial hair or style. They are not hiring for someone to change things, but to do the same things over and over again the same way.
This is important for minorities to realize. This is why his membership in the “African-American business students association” should properly be omitted. Isn’t there just a “business students association” he could have joined instead? In truth, it would have been just as disadvantageous of him to belong to the “Red-Haired business students association”, or the “poodle fancier business students association.”
And yet, when he shows up for the interview, while they will of course notice that he is black, the most important thing is his speech. If when he opens his mouth, he sounds just like everyone else who works there, he will likely be hired. Hopefully he will sound dull, which is what they want.
I hate to read about University of Chicago going downhill for the sake of political correctness. One could have hoped that there were a few, just a few, universities in the US that were purely academic in the finest sense. For whatever reason, in my mind UofC was the most truly intellectual campus in the US. So, I commend you for success in that rigorous environment.
(I still don’t know and don’t want to know the colloquial meaning of that term, just the hints are as much as I need to know)
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