Hiring for Diversity. Arthur Woods
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across your organization, and then measuring your progress against those goals.
And you need to be willing to share your findings with employees, customers, shareholders, applicants—anyone who has a vested interest in your organization. If the people most responsible for diversifying your organization don't have a firm understanding of your current situation, they are not truly empowered to do the job. And sharing data publicly is a critical aspect of accountability; even embarrassing news builds trust among stakeholders and signals that you are serious about making a change.
Unfortunately, too many organizations resist sharing their DEI data publicly. They fear being called out by critics or competitors, or losing applicants who don't want to work for a homogenous organization. That fear is why only 59 out of 931 of America's largest corporations—a mere 6.3 percent—had reported their diversity data as of January 2021, according to nonprofit research company JUST Capital.
At a time when so many employers have publicly stated their commitment to diversity, the public—which includes your potential employees—is expecting to see real results. They are more likely to be patient with an employer that is honest about its challenges and sets out a clear goal for doing better. This is where your organization's mindset can make a difference. Bersin's 2021 study showed that roughly 40 percent of companies were operating their DEI programs from a risk-management perspective, suggesting they were more focused on compliance and risk mitigation than the actual benefits of diversification. But if you're going to “talk the talk” about diversity, you need to be prepared to walk the walk. And that means being clear about where you are and where you hope to end up.
Translating those goals into action is its own challenge. Knowing where you want to end up is different from knowing how you'll get there. With so many approaches and tactics, it's a common mistake to assume there is a viable “one size fits all” approach. Leaders will often copy the diversity goals and tactics used by other organizations without thoughtfully considering what's best and most natural for their own group. Because every organization has its own unique culture and challenges, what works well for one may not work for another. This is why it's important to do some soul-searching to find the most authentic approach for you.
Don't make the common mistake of compartmentalizing your DEI efforts. Instead, approach your diversity goals the way you would any other goal at your organization. Find the North Star that will galvanize your organization and devise a plan to get there. It's rarely a quick or easy journey, but hopefully this chapter will help you find the right path.
Assessing Where You Are in Your DEI Goal-Setting, Strategy, and Reporting
Human nature is a funny thing. When presented with a set of rules and guidelines from someone in a position of authority, we tend to react with skepticism and a dash of ego. Even if those rules are in our best interest and we agree with the ultimate objective, we still can't help but bristle a bit. “Who are you to tell me what to do?”
But those same rules and guidelines, arrived at by mutual effort, can be something we embrace with great enthusiasm. It's why Winston Churchill called democracy “the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried.” If we're going to follow the rules, we would like to have a hand in making them. Really, it's only fair.
The same is true for diversity and inclusion policies. When setting goals, we need the broader team to buy in wholeheartedly, so we need to give people a sense of shared ownership. Simply put, if you want your team to embrace your diversity goals, they need to be part of building them.
We'll discuss later in this chapter how to engage your entire organization in this process. But as you start to think about setting goals and finding the right strategy and tactics, here are some questions that will help you see where you need to focus.
Have you asked your organization and team what they want to see change with diversity? Where do their passions lie in this work? And what will they commit to contributing to the process?
Have you determined your vision and goals for your diversity efforts?
Do your diversity goals naturally align with the culture and process of goal-setting that already exists in your organization?
Do you know the current representation of your team or full organization?
Do you have a system to track your ongoing progress in diversity hiring?
Do you have any capabilities to track the diversity in your applicant pool?
Do you have a process to report your diversity progress and results?
Do you share your diversity progress internally with your team or externally to the public? Or both?
For additional resources to assess your diversity hiring efforts visit: http://Mathison.io/Index.
Whether you are part of leadership, the talent team or neither, these are the high-priority questions you need to address to gain support from upper management. If you're a leader by nature and not (yet) by title, you have every right to ask these questions; use them as the bridge to partner with leadership ambassadors and to find your way to get involved and demonstrate value in the process. You can use these questions to assess current levels of impact and where your shared intent can be applied to create better results.
Uncover Where Your Organization Is Passionate and Ready for Change
To get your team engaged with setting diversity goals, start by asking them about their vision for diversity at your organization, where their energy lies, what they believe needs to change, and what they can commit to contributing as partners in the process (this will be key for activating the work later on). This can be done by hosting a casual conversation in your next team meeting, facilitating a more formal focus group, or circulating an anonymous survey.
Sarah Nahm, co-founder of applicant-tracking system Lever, found that the most effective way to advance the team's diversity goals was to source creative input and ideas from her team. “Some of our earliest diversity and inclusion tactics came straight from our team,” she said. “One team member walked through our hiring process and found that we may be deterring candidates from applying based on rigid skills or experience requirements. As a result we started experimenting with displacing job descriptions with ‘impact descriptions,’ where we removed skills and experience requirements and instead highlighted the impact the candidate would make in the role. This gave candidates the ability to speak uniquely to how they would make that impact and proved to be highly effective for us. This would not have come to life without the input of the team.”
This collective input and involvement from your team is critical to ensuring you have a holistic, inclusive approach that hasn't left out any underrepresented groups or critical steps of your process.
Assess Your Current Diversity Representation
Before you can set your diversity goals, it's important to understand what diversity looks like at your organization. If you don't yet have this data, you can capture it through an anonymous survey. We recommend including diversity questions alongside any other engagement or culture surveys you might be doing so they are naturally included. The survey should be voluntary and anonymous, and it should use that treats your employees with dignity, respect, and fairness. As you are sharing the survey with your team, you can emphasize that the diversity questions are included to better understand the current representation of the team and more accurately set goals for improvement. It's helpful to remind the team that results will remain anonymous and not be used for any purpose other than DEI initiatives.
When writing your survey—or, for that matter, any time you talk about diversity—it's important to use inclusive terms. When asking about specific disabilities, use affirmative terms such as visually impaired, neurodiverse individuals,