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

[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.)