Published on: June 2, 2025 at 5:49 pm
By Nick Keppler
Spurred by the racial reckoning after the 2020 police murder of George Floyd, many large, public-facing companies in the U.S. implemented diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs with the stated goal of addressing their own barriers to hiring of, and advancement for, historically disadvantaged groups.
Too often, these efforts are only aimed at what Academy of Management Scholar Herman Aguinis of George Washington University calls “surface-level diversity,” the presence of people of different races, ethnicities, genders, and other classifications without a change in corporate culture led by executives who value varying perspectives.
“Deep-level diversity is when you have people around the table who bring different experiences and opinions and perspectives to the table, and organizational leaders listen to those diverse voices,” Aguinis said, who has both researched and consulted on institutional barriers that prevent the rise of “star performers” from various backgrounds.
“Surface-level diversity is when you look at someone’s gender, skin color, or race or ethnicity, and that’s what you call diversity,” he said. “It’s much easier to go for surface-level diversity.”
This gravitation towards superficial diversity often starts at the recruitment and interview stages. People in charge of hiring tend to like people with views and appearances similar to their own, said Aguinis, and they can slip into looking for candidates who have the same race, ethnicity, gender, and background as they do.
To prevent bias from creeping into the recruitment and hiring processes, Aguinis recommends conducting structured interviews.
“In a structured interview, you ask the same questions to all the candidates, and you actually score the answers with a scoring key you have created in advance,” he said. “If you have an unstructured interview, where you just chit-chat with a candidate, you’re more likely to like them or not, based on how similar they are to you.
“Also, you should never have just one interviewer because that person’s biases are more likely to be undetected.”
Aguinis added that the perception of a superficial quota system is one cause of a backlash that has led many companies to roll back or rebrand DEI efforts.
“When companies use it—the shortcut of surface-level diversity and just trying to use quotas or things like that—that’s when the diversity seems to be the opposite of what it tries to do: being exclusive instead of inclusive,” he said.
