Apparently thinking that seeking qualified recruits for their accounting department needs means avoiding job fairs hosted by minority professional associations, companies including American Express, Disney and Meta skipped out this month as sponsors of an annual event held by the National Association of Black Accountants. Bloomberg, blaming the federal government’s purge of diversity, equity, and inclusion prioritization from hiring and promotions as scaring employers, reported last week:
By and large, the convention’s traditional backers showed up. For four days in June, signage from employers — Deloitte LLP, Wells Fargo & Co. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. among them — lined the halls of the swanky Aria Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, where 3,300 convention goers mingled and networked. Accounting giant PwC had more than 100 representatives in neon pink shirts with the slogan “Leadership. Business. Inclusion. You.” Even the Internal Revenue Service had a presence, with a booth wedged at the rear of the conference’s career expo.
But in the shadows, there were hints of unease.
Attendance was down from last year, when almost 4,000 students and industry professionals took part. Deloitte, the title sponsor, kept press out of the sessions it underwrote and declined to make featured panelist Lara Abrash, the chair of Deloitte US, available for interviews. And more than two dozen named sponsors from previous years, including American Express Co., Meta Platforms Inc. and Walt Disney Co., were missing from the list this time around…
Corporate employers, particularly the “Big 4” accounting and auditing firms — Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC — find themselves in a tricky spot as they seek to balance a looming shortage of accountants in the US with the expectations of a federal government that’s newly hostile to diversity initiatives.
This represents both ignorant reporting and oblivious human resources management. The business school graduates that populate the upper echelons of corporate HR offices think that eliminating (or more accurately, hiding) their DEI efforts means blowing off perfectly legitimate career fairs where pools of qualified applicants can be discovered, regardless of gender, skin color, sexual orientation, etc. The fact that the IRS under the Trump administration was at NABA looking for good employees indicates that, at the moment, the federal government has smarter hiring managers than those in some of the Fortune 500 companies. That’s a scary thought.
As I told ABC News in January, “You can be fair in hiring and promotions with candidates of all backgrounds and perspectives without resorting to quota systems and considerations based on immutable characteristics.”
Delano Squires/PHOTO: Heritage Foundation
Despite the angle of Bloomberg’s story, at least the end of the article included the perspective of Delano Squires of the Heritage Foundation, who spoke at the NABA event:
Squires doesn’t consider professional organizations like NABA or the National Society of Black Engineers — of which he once was a member — examples of DEI. These groups “were formed long before DEI became a focus of all our major institutions,” he said in an email after the event.
“I make a distinction between ‘wider net’ diversity efforts (e.g., recruiting at a NABA conference) that expand the pool of applicants in a particular organization and ‘lower bar’ diversity initiatives that change or eliminate standards for favored groups at the expense of disfavored groups,” he added.
Exactly. Exploring as broad a viable pool of candidates as possible to find great workers is not DEI. Making hiring decisions to fulfill goals or quotas based on skin color or to achieve a percentage of “diversity” is DEI, and it’s also discrimination.
If Corporate America spent more time looking in all the best places for qualified candidates to fill needed positions, instead of hiding their DEI policies that they don’t want to get rid of, diversity would likely develop organically. But then they’d have to dump all their DEI hires who do the DEI hiring, and companies would lose a crucial virtue-signaling function.
(Feature AI image above generated by Grok)
