Additionally, as mentioned elsewhere in the thread, fake requirements can be used as a reason to arbitrarily reject otherwise good candidates (for example to provide cover for rejection over being a minority). So it's not unreasonable to suspect that minorities have learned to ignore those listings as they just waste time.

It seems like it would be an much easier task to simply broadcast this knowledge to women and minorities than it would be to change the practices of every HR department, no?

Sure, and I've personally been in charity events for economically disadvantaged groups where that's been one of the more important pieces of advice we gave, so such approaches are ongoing, but still the studies indicate the message hasn't gotten through with current levels - so you'd need to either significantly scale up such efforts to reach more people at a personal enough level to convince them, or try another approach.

If that even works. Do white guys who apply say to themselves "those requirements are BS", and minorities say "I don't meet those requirements so I shouldn't apply"? Or is it white guys are more likely to not read them as closely? Or white guys are more likely to feel "I'm good enough to do it regardless of what it asks for"? Or something else? Because just telling minorities "the requirements are more suggestions than requirements" isn't going to help if it's any of those.

None of the above?

You know how peoples used to have folklores and stories that got passed down? Well, we still do, but the culturally transmitted information is now stuff like "Oh, yeah, those requirement lists are bullshit".

Of course not. There are even certain minorities which are known to extremely exagerrate their abilities and accomplishments (even when they wouldn't last a day on actual job).

I really think it's as simple as having friends/peers in the know-how or not. Some people have family members, classmates, maybe even majority of their social circle working in IT which obviously exposes them to inner workings including this issue with job requirements. And then there are people whose social circle is far from IT so they just don't have confidence to (pretty much) lie on resume.

In my experiences of mentoring underrepresented groups in the industry, it’s a matter of morality. Many see it as straight up dishonest to do so. It’s not just some secret hack they can just employ; you’re asking them to cast their morals aside and do something they believe is wrong.

I actually think this _worse_, let alone _much harder_ than simply telling HR to chill with that shit.

So there are two options: tell all minorities to do something they don't know about, or tell people on the top to write realistic requirements. And you think that the right thing to do is to go around and teach this to every minority group. This tells a lot about your position of privilege.

Is it somehow secret knowledge reserved to "privileged" people that minimum requirements on job ads should be interpreted as a wish list more than a list of hard requirements?

It's commonly talked about in a lot of places online, including here.

It's also something you very quickly learn when searching for your 1st job. If you take minimum requirements at face value, there's almost no jobs anyone straight out of school would qualify for.

> Is it somehow secret knowledge reserved to "privileged" people that minimum requirements on job ads should be interpreted as a wish list more than a list of hard requirements?

It is definitely cultural knowledge that not all people have, and, more to the point, an understanding of what parts of a particular job ad that are stated as MQs are likely to be nice-to-haves and which are real MQs and which are nice to haves behind which are hiding real MQs (such as “Ph.D. in <field>” really meaning something like “a Ph.D. would be nice but a Masters is a hard minimum”), and therefore, how to evaluate whether it is worth expending effort applying for a job is non-universal cultural knowledge.

This often requires understanding of the hiring cultures of the particular job-field, industry, employer, and sometimes organizational subunit. Which is, for people just starting out (or looking outside of their past experience), highly network dependent. And equally substantively qualified people from underrepresented demographics arr likely to have weaker, in terms relevant to the task at hand, networks and therefore less access to this cultural knowledge.

> It's also something you very quickly learn when searching for your 1st job.

Or not, in part because there are lots of places where its not true and if you act like it is you will learn hard.

Lying about requirements in hiring may be common, but it is not a universal norm, and calling it out and denormalizing it is a good thing, even outside of discriminatory impact, but its also very much a practice that has particular adverse impact on underrepresented minorities.

When HR creates fake requirements the goal is exactly to be able to weed out anyone they don't like. If someone is not from the "right" group they'll just let them know that they don't meet the "minimum requirements".

That’s a different thesis from what we’re discussing. To clarify, we’re assuming the interviews are fair and the min requirements are being munged by an HR department that doesn’t understand the list that engineering has given them and potential applicants are not even applying based on these garbled job postings. If you think that HR departments are biased and are making up fake requirements, that very well could be the case in some situations, but it’s not what we’re talking about here.

That's a separate issue. The first issue is that those groups don't apply _at all_.