Diversity Hire - Diversity Candidate?

TL;DR: An Individual isn’t diverse, group of individuals are.

Diversity Candidate is a careless term mostly used in hiring diverse talent pool.

While Diversity Candidate in the job description sends across the message to the various underrepresented talent pool, it is a lazy way of describing the culture of the company which values diversity in its workforce and diversity of thoughts. It also has the risk of isolating the employees in the workplace. It has the risk of the dominant group assume that the person was hired because of their ‘diversity’ label and not for their skill.

Each one of us is different from the other. It’s not just the underrepresented community that is different. The dominant representation at work — cis-het-male (able bodied, savarna in Indian context and white in the west) — is very much different from others. The nuance is that an individual isn’t diverse but our organisation, team, social circle, etc are diverse.

A person is not hired for their label or for checking various boxes that makes them different. No company would hire a person who is not skilled. There is a better way to attract underrepresented groups. This includes having a relook at the existing policies and processes that are put together which favours the already dominant groups in the workforce. Unless we acknowledge this, any initiative to be inclusive will fall flat in the long run. The existing folks in the workforce from underrepresented groups are in there “despite” the non-inclusive methods.