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11246

With apologies to those who work in DEI or HR and have studied how slowly we’ve attempted to align our vision as a society to reality, we need a short history lesson to better understand how last week’s Executive Order purportedly to end ‘illegal discrimination’ will impact Human Resources and Talent Acquisition today…and tomorrow.

One of the most significant changes in the last hundred years was the passing of The Civil Rights Act in 1964 - a landmark legislation that outlawed discrimination in the United States. This was a time when protests, riots, and the assassinations of MLK, JFK and RFK defined a generation and signaled a drive to change. I grew up in that world where it was common to hear hiring managers say to recruiters:

• “This just isn’t a job for a woman. They aren’t capable emotionally to handle the stress let alone the physical side of sales.”
• “My customers won’t accept a black, Spanish, gay, old, fat, pregnant etc. etc. in this role. Make sure I don’t see anyone like that.” 
• “I don’t want to see anyone whose accent makes it hard for me to understand them.”

These comments (and much worse) along with stereotypical jokes about individuals in under-represented groups made recruiting (and working) with any sense of fairness a much more challenging task than many might imagine today. There was no one using the word ‘woke’ when you were on a mission to educate, untrain, retrain and, in some cases, step up to hiring managers that needed to find work elsewhere.

JFK proposed the Civil Rights Act in 1963, and Lyndon B. Johnson signed it into law in 1964. Title VII of the Act specifically “prohibited discrimination in hiring, firing, and promotion based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, and creating the EEOC to investigate complaints”. (It is worth noting that the Equal Pay Act was also passed in 1964 and 60 years later we are still debating how to make that work.)

Missing from these laws (mostly to get them passed) was the teeth to enforce them.

Over the years it was Presidential Executive Orders in addition to laws and court cases that have established how to measure fairness in hiring…flaws and all. The most significant support for establishing actions to increase fairness was, arguably, LBJ’s Executive Order 11246 in 1965.

The effect of EO 11246 was to prohibit federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of race, sex, or national origin in employment. It also required them to engage in “affirmative action” and it provided consequences for failure to hire fairly. It was widely adopted by employers regardless of whether they were federal contractors. Affirmative action has been the critical means for how an employer improves representation for qualified individuals who were underrepresented by ‘race, disability, gender, ethnic origin or age’ (expanded over time). Policies, programs, and hiring practices that give limited preferences to individuals from underrepresented groups who were qualified (underline qualified) have been the foundation of how we have made notable progress (albeit slowly) over decades.

I debated the challenges of affirmative action in hiring and management practices during grad school in the 60’s and 70’s. Working for Johnson and Johnson during the 70’s and 80’s, I was committed to their tagline: “Equal Opportunity Beyond Compliance” and helped to define, measure and articulate what that meant in practice. I was also one of thousands of employees urging that our commitment to equality in hiring had to extend internationally at a time when the US had dozens of major firms in South Africa during their Apartheid. J&J was one of the 19 firms that responded aggressively with the Sullivan principles that mirrored our commitment to fair hiring in the US and helped to hasten Apartheid’s end.

J&J’s HR and TA functions rigorously measured the degree of change needed to reach a workforce where qualified representation of race and gender in core functions at varying levels became a doable aspiration and we were transparent to all about how we moved that needle forward. We heavily invested in time and money to source qualified candidates of every race, gender, etc. as a priority. And as HR partners and Recruiters we were also expected to train and influence hiring managers to hire qualified diverse candidates when we worked on filling roles that were seriously underrepresented.

I doubt recruiters working with pride and skill today do anything less.

I certainly would reject the notion that any recruiter could take pride in a career that purposely hires unqualified candidates based on race, ethnicity, orientation, etc. etc. ‘Illegal Discrimination’ is not a result of affirmative action. Demographic biases, conscious or not, still need to be held in check in selection. There is still a significant gap in under-representation that calls to us to upskill recruiters, provide better training for HMs and, especially, clear consequences for failure to ensure, measure and make public outcomes about access and opportunity for qualified workers consistent with our aspiration as a society. 

Last week’s Executive Order may or may not be legal or just gobbledygook but its intent is an attack on our progress as a society and, if upheld or followed, will drive us back to an era that assumed recruiters stepping up to fairness in hiring should be outed or fired for their woke behavior. Collectively we need to raise our voice and take affirmative steps to move forward in 2025.

I do not want to go back to 1965.

For more years than I can count, I’ve devoted my time to learning as a priority. It keeps me engaged, satisfies my curiosity, and fills the gaps between the daily tasks that bring a return. 

Occasionally, what attracts my attention is relevant in the near term, but it is never my intent to discover something immediately practical. Instead, the sparks that fire my imagination typically go into a Tomorrow File - a folder I began keeping during my years at J&J, where budgets always wait for a proper use case and the right timing. 

Fast forward to today however, and the explosion of published content by billions of people curating their own version of reality online makes separating signals from the noise of unreferenced opinions and badly designed research - even (or maybe especially) within HR and Talent Acquisition - a task way beyond my pay grade. Still, for the next few weeks I’ll share what causes me to pause and ruminate about where we’ve been, where we are, and where we can go. If any of this sparks a thought or two, please let me know.