Panel SA: Company defends review of selective processes for inclusion of minorities

For Gustavo Glasser, the difficulties that many companies face when looking for qualified professionals to work in the information technology area are often created by themselves.

There is no shortage of talented people in the market, he argues. The problem lies in the selection processes of companies and the biases they incorporate, which end up making many people invisible to recruitment teams.

Founder and main executive of Carambola, specialized in team building for the IT area of ​​large companies, he advocates another method for selecting and training professionals, which opens the way for groups that are underrepresented in the market, such as blacks, women and gays.

Incorporating greater diversity into the selection processes of companies requires a review of practices that have become obsolete, says Glasser, who was born a woman and abandoned her Christian name, Juliana, when she assumed her identity as a transsexual man two years ago.

​​​THE is wrong with the recruitment process in companies?If you look at any company photo today, it will show mostly male, white, straight, upper-middle class men. It is impossible to think that these are the only people with the capacity to generate results, but the model adopted by companies to hire leads to this.

If we don’t do something to deconstruct the social values ​​embedded in this process, which are within our culture, we will continue to rectify the models that are there. You may not be racist or homophobic, but understanding that these biases are built into the process is the first step in deconstructing it.

Successful executives in the market studied at good universities, so companies have always thought that the way to go would be to hire people from the same background, assuming that they would repeat the performance of the veterans. The appreciation of diversity is greater today, but it is a recent process.

What factors have most contributed to this change?Much of what we are seeing is the result of the action of social movements, which have been demanding this for a long time. But the digital transformation of companies also has an important effect. They need people in the technology area, they go to the market and realize they can’t fill the vacancies they have, because all the upper-middle-class heterosexual white men are hired.

That’s when they realize they need to do something different and begin to re-examine their selection processes. We hear a lot in companies: “Oh, to hire a black person, my bar is up here”. I mean, the person would need to have had the experience of a white person and studied in the same schools to reach this level. Does this bar make sense?

Is the solution to lower the bar?No. The solution is to look at the bar and reflect on the criteria adopted in the selection processes to make them more effective. You can change the bar, turn it on its side, incorporate other elements that can contribute to value creation in a company and are generally ignored.

And that’s not just for hiring. Companies do a series of tests to assess people at entry and then have no tools to follow the journey of these professionals. We see in the market that many black people at the base of the pyramid are unable to grow in companies, because of the same biases built into the selection processes.

How to correct these biases?Many companies think it’s enough to hire more black, women or LGBTQI+ people, but this is a very shallow way to incorporate diversity. Because then they’re just looking at the phenotype, or characteristics of people they can’t change, like their sexual orientation.

It is necessary to take into account other aspects, the context in which these people lived, and build other tools to assess their performance and develop their potential. It’s not enough to know what skills they have today.

We’ve all had a career we learned by working. It is valid for the boy who graduated from the best university in São Paulo and for the girl who studied at a public school in Paraíba. We learn from our experiences, our experiences.

​​​​What Did the pandemic influence this process?Companies need to understand that the future of work is collaborative. The culture of competition is still very strong in the daily lives of companies, but the future will demand a more diverse, inclusive and collaborative work environment.

Everyone had to learn to work remotely and discover new things about the pandemic. Understanding how people learn and develop new skills is essential today, and companies need new tools. More important than evaluating people’s skills at the time of selection is knowing the capacity they will have to acquire others after hiring.

We have a great opportunity now to include others in this process. We already have a lot of things to learn, so we can create opportunities to learn together with people who think differently from us.

Gustavo Glasser, 39

Graduated by Senac (National Commercial Learning Service) in computer science, he started as a developer at a Microsoft innovation center and joined investor Renato de Faria e Almeida Prado to found Carambola in 2013. The company has among its clients Itaú, Ambev and Microsoft. In 2019, it was recognized by the Social Entrepreneur Award, an initiative of the leaf.