Ask a Manager: May I Roundfile Male BYU Grad Applicants?

[minoanmiss]

Can I just reject all male BYU alum candidates?


I have a question about hiring candidates from religious-affiliated colleges (actually, one in particular: Brigham Young University) and whether it would be discriminatory to outright reject male candidates who attended BYU.

I wear many hats at a small-ish graphic design firm in Colorado including having a hand in screening resumes, interviewing, hiring, and onboarding (though I’m not technically in recruiting or HR). In the past 4 years, I have had a hand in hiring two men from this alma mater, and one was already here when I arrived. (So total sample size: three.) They have all been at best a bad culture fit and at worst highly problematic. Ultimately, none were with us more than ten months.

For example, they all had issues to varying degrees working under women (we are a woman-owned and majority female company) and were proudly conservative (while we don’t make a habit of discussing politics, we are definitely on the progressive/liberal side). One complained multiple times about office attire —mind you, we have no problem with our employees staying within our dress code— but he found things as innocuous as sleeveless blouses and skirts-with-any-length slits to be “distracting.” Another frequently talked about his wife in a very sexist and off-putting way. (Most egregiously he told a story about “not letting” her go to the ER when she was seriously ill and begging him to take her. He told this —loudly, out in the open floor plan— as though it were a funny story.) None of these three men opted to put pronouns in their email signatures, and while it’s not a requirement at our company, we pride ourselves on being inclusive, and almost all of our employees choose to. That these three men with the same schooling background comprise fully half of those who haven’t used pronouns in their signatures since I’ve been at the company is a data point I can’t ignore.

I now roll my eyes whenever I come across resumes with male-seeming names and BYU as the alma mater, and am tempted to toss them straight into the recycling bin without a second thought. Would it be religious (or sexist) discrimination if I did?

Yes. It’s illegal to decide you won’t consider candidates based on sex or religion, which is what this would be. It doesn’t matter that you’ve seen a pattern in those hires previously; it would be just as illegal as deciding “I’ve seen a pattern by race X or national origin Y and so I won’t consider candidates from those groups anymore.” The law requires you to consider candidates individually, without regard for race, religion, sex (including transgender status, sexual orientation, and pregnancy), national origin, age (if 40 or older), disability, and genetic information.

You can certainly revamp your hiring practices to screen for people who are aligned with your culture, capable of working effectively with women, etc. But you need to do it by assessing candidates individually, not by lumping them into demographic groups.

Comments

[minoanmiss]

I think this is 60/40 a troll. What do you think?

The conversation went the places you would expect. Highs (figure out how to vet all candidates for sexism during interviews), lows (the plight of the benighted conservative white man) and I don't even know how to characterize the pronouns discussion.

I admit upon seeing the title I said "oh here we go"

[conuly]

A troll, or somebody really dumb - if you’re considering doing something illegal, don’t leave a computer trail! Ffs, if there is one piece of advice I’ve ever given my niblings, no joke, that’s it.

[bikergeek]

"Never write when you can speak; never speak when you can nod; never nod when you can wink." —Martin Lomasney

[ysobel]

I made the mistake of reading comments ... especially the pronoun one. Have regrets.

[melannen]

Putting aside the troll question (and the pronouns and the "you must out yourself at work or you're a magat" discussion): is Alison's legal advice correct here?

No, you can't refuse to hire Mormon men because they're Mormon men. But I feel like saying "graduates of this university don't share our culture so we won't hire them" is, like, the foundation of American capitalism.

(And LW doesn't even mention their religion - there's plenty of asshole BYU grads who aren't Mormon, and if they're in Colorado they're probably seeing plenty of Mormon applicants who didn't go to BYU. Even if it's not a troll it's possible they're deliberately dogwhistling for religion but if someone says they don't hire male Darthmouth grads or female Radcliffe grads because of a bad culture fit it wouldn't be.)

[green_grrl]

As many people pointed out in the comments, there are kids in families who don’t have a choice in where to go for college, but they peace out of the culture afterwards. I liked suggestions like, “interview with an all woman panel, and interview with a mixed panel,” to gauge reactions, along with other culture fit questions.

[melannen]

Oh, yeah, morally, ethically, and practically I think this is a bad idea (and Alison's advice that they need to figure out how to tweak their process so they don't hire these people regardless is good) but the legal advice seemed off.

[lirazel]

Legally, they'd have to prove that it was because of their religion or gender, which would be difficult to do under normal circumstances because American capitalism. But this person LEFT A PAPER TRAIL.

[katiedid717]

My sister and brother-in-law would fall adjacent to this category: they both belonged to the church when they attended BYU and while they could have gone to other colleges/universities, BYU was so inexpensive in comparison - like, think ~$5k/year at BYU compared to ~$40k/year to go anywhere else. They were able to graduate with no student loan debt

[redbird]

I am not a lawyer either, but I'm sure she's right that they can't specifically refuse to hire male BYU graduates. That would have been slapped down as illegal even before the current regime. In the current circumstances, whether LW could get away with discriminating against BYU grads probably depends on whether currently in charge thinks Mormons are "really" Christian, and whether they dislike LW's company for being woman-owned and progressive.

[melannen]

On the gender side they can't, you're right, but saying you can't refuse to hire BYU grads would be like saying you can't only hire Ivy League grads, or only nominate Opus Dei members to the Supreme Court, and I feel like the current admin wouldn't go for that.

[minoanmiss]

There was a discussion in the comments of indirect discrimination -- for instance, refusing to consider candidates from Howard University as a way to avoid considering Black candidates. In the Current Times, not least after at least 2 "reverse discrimination" complaints were upheld by the Supreme Court, I can see a lawyer making the case that discarding BYU graduates' applications is a way to try to avoid Mormon candidates on the basis of religion, even though not all BYU grads are Mormons.

[jadelennox]

I dunno. If someone said "my company refuses to hire Yeshiva and Brandeis grads, but don't filter by other schools" I'm pretty sure the courts would see that intended exactly as it was meant. It would be different if BYU were a low-ranked school -- it's legal to have a school quality filter, and ditching all résumés from Liberty University is as legit as ditching all resumes from U of Phoenix, if that's something that makes sense for the position. But "we only ban Yeshiva and Brandeis, but not equivalent schools" would be taken by pretty much every federal court, correctly, as evidence of a religious filter. You don't need a smoking gun, regardless of who appointed the judges or who is president.

"We ban BYU applicants because we've had a terrible experience with their candidates, and we think they prepare people poorly for the workplace": almost certainly legal, assuming you don't leave a paper trail like this LW, especially if you only apply the ban to recent grads without a work history. "We ban BYU applicants because they all seem to have conservative views on women (wink) and modest clothing (wink wink) and queerness (wink wink wink) and husbands being in charge (wink x 1000) especially if the applicants have male-sounding names [this one is explicitly illegal]" would probably be harder to defend.

(Also it's stupid. I've known some great BYU alumni. Also, even with a politics filter, exmos and leftist utahns need jobs, too.)

[jack]

I emphatically agree that you can't legally make that a blanket policy. And emphatically agree that there will be people who are a good fit who just happened to go to BYU. And emphatically agree that a more effective policy is to actively screen for culture fit, e.g. by asking someone if they work ok for a manager who's a woman or is trans and expecting that the sort of person they're worried about will not try to hide their leaning very effectively.

But I also think, in practice, there's a difference whether they're talking about "we have an open position and got four applicants and three would be a good fit otherwise" or "we have an open position and got 50 CVs most of which are terrible and trying to decide which ones are worth hiring."

My experience is that at that point almost all companies winnow based on fairly superficial factors. It's extremely common to require a university degree with I think is ethically and legally indirect discrimination, even though they stand almost no risk of having legal consequences for it. Most hiring managers have some weird preferences, and even the good preferences aim to find enough good candidates, not ALL good candidates.

Some particular things are more actively legally forbidden depending on country. But if someone quietly assumed that candidates from BYU, especially recent graduates, who don't have any life history suggesting they're more progressive than average, are mostly a bad culture fit, and decided who to ask for interview on that basis, and those candidates aren't head and shoulders above the other candidates, (and they managed to avoid writing into a national newspaper SAYING they're doing it), I think it's extremely likely that no-one would ever notice. Even though I wouldn't advise them to do that in writing.

I think that the way humans talk, it's common that people will SAY something like "can I reject all BYU applicants" with a little picture in their head of how they imagine a typical BYU alum, even if when they get an applicant who had an obvious LGBT-community history, or other indications of being pro-diversity, they would say "oh well, obviously it doesn't apply here". I find it annoying that people make false over-generalisations, but I think it's worth pointing out "you might miss good people where there's no indication they're not typical" but not worth assuming that if someone said "all" they literally mean "literally all, without exception, regardless of how irrelevant and nonsensical the policy would be in an individual case" and arguing with them as if that's what they meant.

I am similarly stressed by people's attitudes to hiring. My natural approach to that, and a lot of other things, is to stick to what I mean: if we're going to not discriminate, we should not discriminate. Whereas most people will SAY they won't discriminate, but will happily go along with types of discrimination which are currently common and effectively legal without seeing any contradiction, while massively criticising me if I refuse to SAY that I'm 100% literally universally non-discriminatory, even if I'm aiming for a bar that's as close to 100% as I think I can get and a lot, lot a higher than their bar.