Required information

Case $2-5$ Not so Equitable, Diverse or Inclusive $($a GVV case$)$

You are the Controller for Mountain Manufacturing which produces specialized components used in the manufacturing of cell phones sold by Apple, Motorola, and Samsung. The company is located in Southglenn, CO$,$ a suburb of Denver.

Demand for your products continues to grow year over year. However, due to a high level of employee turnover, it has become increasingly difficult to keep up with demand for your products. In addition, the costs involved in employee onboarding $($the process of finding, screening, and hiring employees$)$ has skyrocketed in the last couple of years.

An analysis you performed shows overall turnover to be $25$ percent annually, with turnover to be much higher $(40$ percent$)$ for employees in their first year with the company. You are really concerned due to manufacturing delays caused by the personnel shortage that you might lose one of your three primary customers, which would be catastrophic to the company and its investors. To see if you could learn anything else from the employment data, you did queries on employee age, gender, race, home zip code, and wage comparing those to the employee's number of months of employment.

Your analysis indicated that turnover of employees of color is five times that of the company's white employees. This finding is of great concern to you, as the company describes itself as having a high level of diversity among its staff and as being a very open and inclusive company. There also seemed to be a much higher level of turnover of employees who live in one particular zip code. You know that particular area is not considered to be a desirable place to live with a very low median income, low real estate values, a high level of crime, and the worst schools in the area.

You share your findings during a meeting with the company's CEO and the Director of Human Resources. The Director of Human Resources said she was aware of the disproportionately high turnover for persons of color and women, but did not know what could be done to improve the situation. She shared that last year she and her staff had screened over $25,000$ resumes, interviewed close to $3,000$ candidates, and hired over $2,500$ new employees. She stated the high amount of overall and new hire turnover results in a continuous recruitment effort with no time left to concentrate on improving the work environment for all the employees. She described it as somewhat of a vicious cycle that she did not think they could break.

At this point, the CEO cleared his throat and stated he knew exactly what to do$.$ He said they had a similar situation at his last place of employment and they simply stopped hiring employees who lived in the areas with the highest turnover. He said it worked great. Retainage immediately improved as did their overall hiring costs. He also suggested using a thirdparty company to perform the initial screening of resumes for the HR department. He said they use computers to scan and read every resume and screen them for the specific qualifications and other parameters the employer would like them screened for. He said it is a great way to screen out those who you do not think will be a good fit to start with. Zip code of residence could be one of the attributes the computer uses to eliminate candidates from the pool.

The CEO concludes the meeting stating he was glad he could help solve that problem, and to let him know if you need help with anything else.

$2-5$: Qu $01$ What biases if any did you identify...

What biases if any did you identify as possibly being at play in the above scenario? Be sure to explain what the bias is and how it may be involved in this case.