STUDY OF THE PERCEPTION OF INCLUSION OF EMPLOYEES RECRUITED BY EXCLUSIVE RECRUITMENT PROCESSES

Abstract

As a key element towards social progress, enhancing diversity and inclusion in the workplace have been the main subject of many management approaches over the last decades. One of the most recent illustration of such tendency are exclusive recruitment processes. Exclusive recruitment processes are recruitment processes organized by organizations and opened for candidates who identify with one or several diversity criteria: women, black, LGBTQIA+, people with disabilities… (among the most common ones). Only people identifying with the criteria will be able to apply for the position and participate to the interviews. The Brazilian employment market has been a pioneer in the organization of such practices often leading to numerous controversies or public debates around the morality or alleged efficiency of such programs. Nevertheless, as few research was focusing on the perception of inclusion of the people who had participated to exclusive recruitment programs, the role of this study is to give an overview and analysis of this set of perception to understand the true impacts of such processes on workers’ feelings. A qualitative method was used to interview six different Brazilians who had all participated in exclusive recruitment processes to enter their current positions and corresponded to a representative sample of the reality of exclusive processes to date. The results reflect the views of those who participated to exclusive recruitment processes and not companies’ perspectives. The results show that participants of the study were unanimously positive regarding their perception of inclusion in the company not only at work but in their interactions with other colleagues. No major pattern of discrimination has been identified in the case of workers who participated in exclusive recruitment programs. To the contrary, results tend to show that workers tend to feel better in their companies if they entered through a program which celebrated their diversity. Finally, the findings reveal that the phenomenon is growing in Brazil giving access to the employment market to previously excluded or under-represented communities in a country with deep structural inequalities.