You -- and you know who you are -- need not apply

Here's my experience (and I know I'm late to the discussion):

Our sports staff where I work in Louisiana had never had anything but white males in its entire history up until this winter, when we hired a black guy. Considering our city is almost 50/50 racially, I had become keenly aware of how our staff did not reflect the population of the city we covered. HOWEVER, the last time we had opened a search, there were exactly zero minority applicants (we wound up re-hiring the guy who had just left...he had decided that the grass was not really greener in his new job and asked to come back)...

How did we get our first minority staffer? We had a young father on our sports staff who wanted 9-to-5 hours for marriage/fatherhood reasons. News had a young (African-American) features writer who seemed more enthused about stringing for sports than he was for working on his news stories. So they traded spots, basically.

What's the moral to the story? I'm not 100 percent sure. We never had a minority search and, eventually, we "diversified" anyway. But it was also a very unusual circumstance. Had this trade not happened, we probably would have gone into the next decade still without our first minority staffer, even as our city's racial balance tilts more black.

Here's a second story that ties in. On the news side, the diversity question became an issue for us in the late 1990s. So the executive types decided to do a minority search. They were more thorough, and professional, about this search than they normally are (we tend to have regional candidates in mind when we start searches, which is hardly unusual). We wound up with a recent Stanford grad who really contributed to the staff, in my opinion, before he went off to bigger things. I think our paper improved for his having been here.

So if a minority hire forces you to do a truly professional, nationwide search, then it wouldn't be the worst thing that could happen.

 

Job still open, to best of my knowledge. Not happy with candidates they have brought in -- or the candidates they brought in haven't been happy with the paper. Interviewing strictly according to the agenda cited, so far.

 

It is amazing how often we can't agree on that last point on these threads.
But I have to say, this one has been better than most on the topic.

 

I have no problem with a publisher, ME and SE going behind closed doors and saying, "We will not hire a white male for this position." But I see absolutely no point in broadcasting that decision. Just make the damn hire, and make sure you don't compromise your standards to do it.