CHAPTER 2 Building Your Diversity Hiring Vision, Goals, and Reporting

      If you look at organizations that have made the greatest strides in their diversity hiring, you find that they all have certain things in common: they set clear goals, measured their results, and reported their progress.

      This may sound obvious, but you'd be surprised how many smart, well-meaning organizations think they can skip these steps. And when they do, it rarely goes well.

      In 2016, the New York Times Company published its first public diversity report. The report showed that in 2015, women made up 45 percent of the company and 40 percent of leadership. However, people of color represented just 27 percent of the company and 17 percent of leadership. For an organization that had long prided itself on holding those in power to high standards of diversity, equality, and justice, the report was an embarrassment. The Times’ own public editor, Liz Spayd, wrote a scathing column headlined, “Preaching the Gospel of Diversity, but Not Following It.”

      “When you ask managers about the issue individually, everyone genuinely seems to care,” she wrote. “Collectively, however, not much changes.” Other publications were even less forgiving in their coverage.

      The Times had made a bold move in sharing its representation data publicly, even knowing it would reflect badly on the company. Now, the Times needed a plan to do something about it. Stacey Olive, the Times’ then VP of Talent Acquisition, and her team knew this was a critical moment for the organization and that all eyes were upon them.

Olive's team had been searching for a strategy for diversity hiring but needed a powerful goal they could use to galvanize the organization around the work. They knew that setting arbitrary diversity quotas could be hard to enforce, and it was difficult to know where to even start. Instead, she and her team decided to set process goals and center their diversity efforts around “four pillars” of operating. Every job at the Times would be expected to adhere to these pillars to ensure equity and representation in the process:

      After successfully testing the model on her own team, Olive got the green light from leadership to implement it across the organization. That meant making sure that everyone at the Times not only understood the principles but embraced them. Olive and her team knew that if the people in charge of hiring didn't take ownership over the mission, it was unlikely to succeed. They took careful steps to ensure every leader fully understood the model and had everything they needed to execute it.

      But they also understood that principles and directives don't mean much without some means of enforcement, so they established a rule that any exception to the model required executive approval. They also built a reporting structure to verify the process was taking place and built a new system for capturing exceptions to see where any patterns arose. Now, when leaders received exception requests, they were more likely to ask for reasons and less likely to grant the request.

      Olive and the team witnessed a culture shift around this work and a visible change in the way team members were operating. It became clear that they were starting to care about getting it right.

The results were encouraging. In the first year, the team achieved 90 percent diversity in the candidate pipelines and interview panels and saw their diversity numbers rise in every department. By 2017, women represented 50 percent of the company and 46 percent of leadership, up 5 percent and 6 percent, respectively. People of color rose to 28 percent at the company and 20 percent in leadership (up 1 percent and 3 percent, respectively). The four pillars had become embedded in the hiring process for every role and in the daily vernacular of every team member. For Olive, what started as a unique approach to diversity goal-setting resulted in a more diverse New York Times.

      DEI remains a work in progress at the Times, but this peek behind the scenes demonstrates how setting clear goals and guidelines and taking the time to encourage stakeholder adoption can lead to change. There's also something to be said for the motivational effects of exposing yourself to public scrutiny.

      Your organization may not have the resources or the profile of the Times, but leaders at most levels of any organization are already accustomed to setting goals. They just need to apply those skills and mindset to their diversity hiring efforts. Doing so requires finding the right balance and answering some important questions: What goals are ambitious yet achievable? How can we apply quantifiable measures to this more human space? What additional stakeholders will support these goals?

WHY DIVERSITY GOAL-SETTING, STRATEGY, AND REPORTING MATTERS

      If we think of diversity hiring as building a house, then reporting data and setting goals are the foundation. But too many organizations try to build their house without first laying that foundation, which is one reason DEI efforts so frequently fail. In fact, according to a 2021 study by Josh Bersin, founder of talent management consultancy Bersin & Associates, 76 percent of companies have no diversity or inclusion goals at all.

As with most aspects of business, you can't manage what you can't measure. If you are serious about diversifying your organization, you need to apply the same rigor to those efforts as you do to other strategic priorities. That means assessing the situation, setting