That isn’t completely true. You can land a job via an ad, it is very very hard, but it is probably a bit higher than 1%. Especially entry level positions where a professional network isn’t expected anyways.
Be that as it may, if I were a hiring manager today whose bonus and promo opportunities depend on meeting the diversity quota, you can guess how I'd be setting up the targeting on my hiring ad campaign, ethics be damned.
That having been said, I fully agree that such targeting in job ads in particular should be illegal. I agree with this out of my own rational self interest, as a straight white male in my 40s. Other aforementioned types of gender, racial, and age discrimination should be made illegal as well.
Well, if you were smart about it you wouldn’t focus on ads at all. Rather you’d figure out how to poach known talent from other companies. Easier still if you were looking for entry levels, hitting the universities directly would work given recent enrollment increases (start them out with good internships during the sophomore or junior years would be much more useful here).
I don’t see how an ad would be effective at all in this hiring climate. Yes, you might get something, but you would be unlikely to get a woman or underrepresented minority hire, even if they were specifically targeted. They have much better options than to answer these ads.
That's exactly what we did, with a modicum of success. The pickings are super slim, though. Most CS students don't really seem to give a shit about CS, meaning they don't do anything other than coursework, at all, and their coursework is pretty primitive, and uses Java which our company had no use for.
Another problem is when you go to career fairs, easily 9 out of 10 people coming to your booth will be looking for an internship rather than a job. This isn't a problem per se, if you're a large company this is actually pretty great. But I was hiring for a small (at the time) startup, so that was a bit of a waste of everyone's time. Still we landed a few diamonds in the rough after a few attempts. 8/10, would hire from local schools again.
Ironically, the most extensively qualified candidate I met at these career fairs was female. She was in grad school and had a resume you wouldn't believe if you'd seen it, and very obviously smart as a whip. She was, however, too smart to work for a startup. Can't say I blame her.
