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

[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