Quotas don’t improve access

In an India that is showing increasing fissures on the issues of caste, community and religious-based diversity, this article is about possibility. I write with specific reference to increasing access to employment in the private sector to a larger base of the population.

The article is based on four premises. First, the private sector in India is here to stay and needs support to grow. Second, India still faces a landscape where a vast section of the population has no access to basic services, and hygiene and education.

Third, it is partnerships between the state, business and civil society that move beyond the policy level that will help India’s corporate sector in its search for talent.

It is these same partnerships that can truly help society address at least some issues that have been raised about diversity and exclusion in India. Fourth, the key to addressing some of India’s diversity-based challenges is how we define merit and how we tackle some of the unconscious biases inherent in this definition

I write not as an activist but as an advocate for inclusionary efforts that can work at the practical level and, in many instances, have been shown to work.

The private sector cannot play the role of the state. Nor should it. It can, however, in the spirit of enlightened self-interest, increase the size of the talent pool from which it recruits by assimilating some information about current practices and implementing them.

Being democratic about opportunity involves redefining merit sensibly to create more opportunities for corporate India to win the “war for talent”.

The first good practice is to ensure that wherever appropriate, interviews and discussions permit a certain amount of discussion in the regional language. I suggest this for two reasons.

First, evidence shows that candidates from some castes and religious groups have faced more exclusion in education and hence have less opportunity to learn English. They also have very limited access to larger social and employment networks. Second, while fluency in the English language is a great advantage, it need not feed into a universal definition of merit.

A number of roles, especially in retail and media require strong regional language skills to be done well.

Additionally, a number of roles in software require a strong command over technical skills, and people who have these skills may not possess formal degrees. They work independently, or they may be part of local civil society networks that look at employability, but they may not be visible to a hiring pool.

A number of these organisations have used innovative methodologies to merge with communities and build useful skills, especially in the field of computer education. Additionally, a number of these NGOs do make the effort to get listed on larger employment and “governance’ screening portals. The one consistent challenge they face is the challenge of English education being viewed as mandatory when it may not be.

A corporate policy that is willing to look at this pool of talent will benefit. The concerns raised are two-fold. First, is it possible to level the playing field at all? The answer is that even modest amounts of investments in language training can pay off very well to candidates who use this opportunity.

Second, will candidates get pigeonholed in certain kinds of roles? The answer to this is straightforward but nuanced. First, not everyone who gets a job is going to be able to stay and grow in the organisation. It is also true that a number of roles require fluency in English and therefore not everyone from a marginalised community may immediately qualify for all roles. However, from an applicant’s point of view, dignified employment is better than unemployment.

Second, very few organisations can and should recruit every candidate for lifetime permanent employment. Very few advocates of any kind of inclusion will suggest that all candidates stay on regardless of performance.

The second suggestion is that at least the first level of screening should be ‘blind’, where names and personal details get hidden.

A number of companies are doing this already with the help of software and this is a practice that can be readily adopted so that unconscious bias can get further reduced. Research shows that these biases may screen out people in the first stage on the basis of personal details rather than ability to perform a role, and that this can happen before a person gets called in for a discussion.

Third, companies often use a competency framework that looks at knowledge and skills needed to succeed in a role. Good, structured interviews do evaluate whether a candidate does or does not have the ability to display certain skills. Investments need to continue to be made to refine the interview process to test for capacity to do a role, thereby reducing the unconscious bias of a ‘halo effect’ of personality to solely drive a decision or create a tipping point.

Fourth, a number of companies use psychometric instruments when testing for hiring. A number of these instruments are helpful when used appropriately. However, many of them are not friendly to speakers of languages other than English. More companies are becoming conscious of how these instruments need to be used. This practice needs to continue as it will also help increase the talent pool a company reaches.

This is not an argument for ‘quota-based affirmative action’. On the contrary, there is enough evidence to show that the more we remove unconscious biases, the greater the talent pool that is within our reach. And, at least in some kinds of inclusionary efforts, including gender and disability, these have been shown to be linked to increases in competitiveness or other healthy financial indicators. Why not give the other kinds of diversity in India a chance?

The writer has over 20 years of work experience in HR, diversity and CSR

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