Home Depot Case Study: a Bumpy Road to Equality

Abstract

Discrimination is found everywhere in the world including the workplace. I will be talking about how Home Depot changed the way we look at discrimination. After receiving a number of complaints, Home Depot found a way to change how we look at the qualifications and skills compared to physical appearances using technology Now that technology is a huge part of our lives, how can we use this technology to change the hiring process for huge corporations like Home Depot.

If Home Depot was correct in that it was not discriminating, but simply filling position consistent with those who applied for them, given your reading of this chapter, was the firm guilty of discrimination? If so, under what theory? Home Depot is America’s largest home-improvement stores with more than 413,000 employees and earnings over $8.6 billion dollars. Being one of the largest retailers in the world also comes with many challenges. In Home Depot’s case it struggles a lot with discrimination within the workplace. Based on the type of work it is easy for Home Depot to cater to male-dominant roles in the company. Home Depot is known for its do-it-yourself projects and labor work making it look for more male employees but, in this day, and age women are just as qualified if not more for that position.

As the article stated Home Depot was accused of placing women in cashier positions and men in home-repair positions. The women stated they applied to be in the home-repair positions but were overlooked based on gender. After reading this chapter and the case on Home Depot I do believe that they were guilty of discrimination because of the company hiring a majority of male employees for the home-repair positions. As women were equally qualified for these positions, Home Depot was guilty of the disparate treatment Disparate treatment “occurs when an individual or individuals in a similar situation are treated differently based on color, religion, sex, national origin, age, race or disability status”. They failed to consider the representation of the minority groups.

In this case I believe it was based on sex and race because the women were the minority in this case and the African American women from Florida were being passed over for promotions. They didn’t hire women into the customer service position but instead cashiers. Even though the woman might have had more experience with the cashier positions, it is good to be a well-rounded individual and learn more than one position in a company. The woman still had the qualifications for the home-repair positions as well. Every day we see racism and sexism in the workplace for example last week we saw how it played a role in the Citibank discussion. Women are not being moved into management and more male-dominant roles as well as not being paid the same as men based on their gender. Not only Home Depot, but if every company implemented something like this, the number of lawsuits and accusations would reduce.

How does this case illustrate the application of new technology? Can you think of other ways technology might be used to address diversity/EEO/affirmative action issues? After being accused of discrimination against women and different ethnicities, Home Depot had to find a way to sort through all the applications based on qualifications. In 2015, Home Depot came out with the Job Preference Program. This is an automated kiosk for applicants to put in all of their information making it easier for management to look for qualified applicants based on their skills and qualification rather than sex, age, race, religion etc. The Job Preference Program is also used for current employees to put in new update information to be considered for a promotion.

Using this technology, Home Depot has increased their women employees in home-repair positions as well as the ethnic percentage in employees since the Job Preference Program has been implemented. Their managers spent less time going through applications and more time interviewing the right candidates and promoting current employees. Technology has been very important to job searching in the last few years, to the extent that most people find the best candidate through website such as LinkedIn and Indeed.com. Websites like these are shaping the way companies are profiling their candidates to find the perfect match. Similar to that of the Job Preference Program, websites like LinkedIn and Indeed.com are used by thousands of companies every day. They help companies to look at skills and qualifications rather than physical attributes. These websites help reduce the time of human resource professionals from recruiting and hiring and more time on the more important issues.

References

1. Investor Relations (n.d.). Retried January 30, 2019, from http://ir.homedepot.com/
2. Noe, R. A., Hollenbeck, J. R., Gerhart, B. A., & Wright, P. M. (2014). Human resource management: Gaining a competitive advantage. New York: McGraw-Hill.