“Racism” is the word that liberals use to end intellectual debate… it truly reflects poorly on them when they try to play the race card…

Again you are being foolish when you suggest the “best person” for the job is “pale”. Most times it is not but for reasons you can’t understand given your distorted view of the world.

Often “white” people are easier hires. You don’t deal with cultural conflict in an organization and that is a “real” thing. So hiring white people is easier, but not necessarily the best thing for the company.

Because making the “easy” hire means you end up with someone that is less good at the job, but who “fits” in the corporate culture. Think about the movie “Remember the Titans”. It took a lot to build a multiracial football team… but it also meant you drew from the best talent instead of limiting it to one racial group. I learned that from sports. Like that movie, I played on a team that never lost in high school for four straight years… set the state record for consecutive wins and enjoyed four straight state championships. We were built on talent, not skin color. That lesson has always stuck with me.

As a result, I have always felt if someone can manage people that don’t fit perfectly with corporate culture, then you can gain competitive advantage by leveraging what people do well.

For example, I built data a entry operation on a bus line beside the inner city neighborhood because the best available workforce for the job were African American women. Why? As single mothers they were dependable, but many lacked transportation. Other employers did not make the effort of locating along mass transit lines to capture this under utilized talented workforce.

At another company, I built two operating units one comprised of deaf people and the other of wheelchair bound employees. Doing so required a bit of front end investment in special desks for those in wheelchairs in addition to special safety protocols involved when evacuating the building.

For deaf employees it requires installing alarm lights overtop of every cubicle since they could not hear the alarm. In exchange, I got talented employees who appreciated the effort the company made and my additional investment was offset by lower turnover and the costs associated with training new employees.

Having come up through the ranks of finance, I benefited from the universal language of numbers, often hiring immigrants with increible accounting and computer skills but relatively poor language skills. Who cares… as long as the books are keep straight. Some employers considered the fact that these employees because of their language skills were “not the best”. There loss… my gain.

The head of my IS department was from India. He went to the top IT school in India… and when you are among the top out of a billion people, you tend to be pretty good. Today he is CEO of tech startup. At the time, he worked for me, we identified college educated mothers as an underutilized workforce, so as far back as 20 years ago we built the first cloud applications for our industry in order to take advantage of this work force that others were overlooking. We saw working from home as a big gain, when other companies were trapped in their history of floors full of people working in cubicles… a lot of important work needs to get done this week… not this minute… so the challenge was how to get the work to these people working at home and how to track the time they worked… figure that out, and millions of highly qualified mostly women became available to your workforce. Smarter and better educated than their white male counterparts, who wanted to work in offices.

I built a number of “employee model” physician groups… white men were the least attractive employee to hire since many of them wanted to have their own businesses. Women, immigrants, and minority doctors on average were more focused on the practice of medicine and less on the business of medicine. We went out of our way to recruit from groups other than white men. I designed a whole physician company around the simply concept that many great physicians wanted to earn a competitive salary, work something approaching normal hours, and not have to deal with running a practice.

You appear to be someone that has never run a business. Do you think if you ran a business you would undermine it by selecting employees based on race. Only idiots do that. It has nothing to do with not discriminating… you do discriminate… you look for the best person for the job.

What I don’t believe is that people are commodities… each person is different… if you can find out a “hook” to attract really good people to your company by meeting their needs… you win… if you can’t, your company is nothing more than an aggregation of average people.

It is true that the best people can often be found in targeted groups for various reasons… for inner city African American mothers, it was their lack of transportation and the need to design your operating model to fit the fact that they often need to be home when their children are home.

For people that don’t speak the English, you can’t deploy them as customer service reps, but there are plenty of jobs where language is not a key skill. The point is hiring the best people often involves understanding what “best” means… to me it was related to how much work output I could get… not what they looked like or sounded like or whether they could hear or even walk. Sadly, for the government it means whether they fit an identity profile…

Again imagine what you would do, if you owned a business… wouldn’t you want the best people for the job… the question is how creative are you to give you a chance to achieve that goal… my simple question to my Human Resources Dept once I attained the level of running a company with 42,000 employees…

What are we doing to attract and keep the best people… if we are not doing anything special, then assume we are hiring average people… if we are overly bureaucratic assume we are hiring below average people… the best people deserve a company going the extra mile to attract and retain them… but it also means we have the right to want the best… because we will do more for our employees than other companies will.

An example of “more”… going back to that operation designed to attract single African American women… every once in a while winter weather caused the mass transit lines to stop running… so I personally drove every employee home to make sure they got home safely. Employees know when you care… and when you go the extra mile for them, the good employees go the extra mile for you… when you are under a crunch and need people to step up…

That is what hiring and keeping the best employees is all about…