What is Employment Equity and Equitable Hiring?

“Gaps in representation and pay for marginalized groups remain stubbornly high, and year after year employment is the most litigated area of discrimination at the BC Human Rights Tribunal.” –BC’s Office of the Human Rights Commissioner

Employment equity refers to removing barriers that prevent marginalized groups from fully participating in the workforce.

These barriers often arise when people assume that ‘fair treatment’ means ‘treating everyone the same.’ In reality, fair treatment requires accommodations to ensure equal opportunities for participation and success.

The spaces we work in have been shaped over time, both intentionally and unintentionally, by biases. These biases tend to be invisible until we examine how they affect those excluded from shaping our workplace’s norms and practices. Biases in the workplace can significantly influence who gets recruited, retained, and promoted.

This discrimination is usually unintentional and can be reinforced by simply continuing old habits. For example, hiring through employees’ personal networks often leads to a workforce where most people have similar backgrounds and experiences. Not only is this unfair, but it can erase the advantages diversity brings, which will be outlined in the following pages.

This guide focuses on creating equitable hiring practices, a crucial aspect of employment equity. Equitable hiring does not mean compromising on qualifications or hiring unqualified individuals for the sake of diversity. Instead, equitable hiring is the practice of creating fair and inclusive hiring processes that remove barriers, provide accommodations, and ensure all candidates, including those from marginalized groups, have an equal opportunity to compete for a role. It involves critically examining what defines the “best candidate” for the job and designing inclusive processes to find them.

This guide provides strategies for faculty to think critically about the ‘best candidate’ in the context of your department and to design a process to find that candidate in a fair and inclusive way.