Hiring Diverse Talent, Sans Bias
Meeting diversity goals set by your talent acquisition team or key company stakeholders is a slippery slope (heeey Google). Navigating how to funnel diverse candidates into your pipeline while giving proper and equal consideration to all candidates regardless of race, age, gender and religion in an unbiased way can seem challenging, so let’s take a look at how this process can be streamlined and demystified for optimal impact.
What Are Your Company’s Specific Diversity Shortcomings?
Let’s start with the hard question — what are the most underrepresented groups in your workforce today? Uh-oh, now you have to, *gasp* examine company demographics by business unit and seniority and essentially highlight “otherness” on your teams — something most professional environments try to discourage (without success, I might add). Determining this is a very important first step as it will allow you to be focused and clear about what your diversity hiring goals are.
My rule of thumb is this: start at the top. If your organization has a glaring lack of women (or people of color, etc.) in leadership, start there (and what a great place to start, as well). That doesn’t mean that you ignore the fact that there are absolutely no people of color or women working as individual contributors on your sales or technical teams, that just means that you have a great origin point to create a plan of action for that particular disparity — which will allow you to create a clear benchmarks for that particular diversity hiring goal. Tracking your progress is key, after all.
What’s more, putting chronically underrepresented professionals at the top of your pyramid will tap into their networks which will undoubtedly include people that look like them, and who kick as much ass as they do— then you can hire them!
Oh, so, there are absolutely no people of color on your sales or technical teams? Join the club (heeey Google!). When I led diversity hiring initiatives for a top tech company, my enduring mission was finding ways to identify and attract diverse candidate pools. This was a challenge, and even more challenging the higher the seniority of the vacancy.
The good thing is, focusing first on filling the top ranks with a diverse set of uber-qualified leaders opened up a flow of referrals from those leaders, and it was almost always an amazing source of talent that we were able to filter into those hard to fill (in general) sales and engineering roles.
The point is, shifting the diversity dynamic on your team is a huge challenge that is best tackled by asking real questions about the current demographics on your team, and deciding, thoughtfully, where to target the bulk of your efforts first. You can never go wrong in first targeting leadership positions in tandem with any other initiatives that are important to the success of your company.
The Diversity You Seek Is Right in Front of You!
So, you know what groups you should target to bolster the diversity on your teams, now, how do you do it?
If you’ve been told that hiring diverse candidates is a priority for your team (as it should be, always) then the first step is recognizing that your company has a diversity problem in its existing workforce. Now, I don’t mean that there are literally no people of color, for example, on your team, but take a real look around, what are the distributions you see? Where do you find the most diverse teams? Human Resources, perhaps? Administrative staff? Sales? Finance? Wherever you see it, wherever you don’t see it, take note and take action.
Work with your human resources team to read performance reviews — paying specific attention to any areas that charge the team member to discuss their desired progression plans. If your human resources team doesn’t ask that question, explicitly, on performance reviews that they distribute to team members, that’s a problem that you should help them solve immediately.
Take a look at the desired career paths of your team members. Where can you, as a company, fill in their knowledge gaps so that they might be contenders for roles on other teams within your company that would benefit from more heterogeneity?
This method is also a low-bias act as these high-performers already work for your company, continue to prove themselves, and have built key relationships within your organization — all traits that keep the bias of a person deciding those things about a stranger (external hires are strangers) at a minimum.
Grow your own, and they will be loyal, and they will perform way better than any new talent you bring into the fray once they have the necessary skills, and it costs way less than hiring externally.
Stop Bias from Breaking Good Diversity Hiring Intentions.
So, you’ve identified areas for improvement on your team, you’re watering your seeds and growing your own, and you’ve dove head first into hiring a diverse set of leaders, and those leaders are spearheading the charge in sending qualified referrals. Great. Now how do you avoid the slippery slope and keep bias out of hiring and vetting these leaders and referrals with an eye on diversity? This is an important question, because let’s face it, alienating ANY members of the human population through diversity-focused hiring practices is a humongous no-no.
Therein lies the conundrum.
The first thing you must recognize is that keeping bias out of hiring is damn near impossible. If you’re working for any organization worth its salt, there is ongoing training and conversation about how to combat unconscious bias in the workplace. Still, humans are going to human, and that means that while reviewing resumes, creating hiring plans, and interviewing candidates, that sneaky little devil bias is creeping around like a ninja in your brain — IF — these things are being created based on gut feeling and incomplete ideas about the goals, outcomes, and major business impact of the role for which you’re hiring.
Long story short, if you know exactly what you’re hiring for, bias will have a hard time edging its way around your efforts.
Now what I say next might be controversial, but it’s the truest thing I can offer about how I increased the diversity of my team by leaps and bounds. When it comes to methodology, hiring for diversity shouldn’t be your goal, removing the potential for biases in your hiring process should be your goal. All the rest will follow.
What does that mean? That means that when you decide you want to hire for a role, you need to sit down and have a candid conversation with your stakeholder or hiring manager about what he or she sees as the key outcomes for this role. Don’t ask them about skills, don’t ask them about years of experience (you will determine that, talent acquisition professional!) don’t ask them to send you ideal profiles (bias alert!). All you need from them is a list of duties for the role, what success looks like (explicitly) and how the role impacts the business, either on a macro or micro level depending on the role. If your hiring manager cannot give you this information, well, it looks like they’re not quite ready to hire. The moment we let murky goals and outcomes into the equation, bias is born and here to stay in the process.
Once you have what you need, take it to your desk. Don’t start looking at candidate profiles just yet, simply take the time to build an ideal candidate profile that incorporates all of the things that your hiring manager mentioned. Assess the skills needed to achieve those goals and outcomes, and add those to your profile.
From there, assess an average experience level based on the actual deliverables this role has. This act will untether you from searching for people that overshoot your needs. What happens when you create a realistic ideal candidate profile? One that paints the picture of the literal right person for the job? You open up your candidate pool, and that pool will include a varied spectrum of talent. You’ll get hard workers of various experience specializations who’ve achieved just as much, or more, than the cookie-cutter (“top talent”) profile and who may be on track to the top of their field.
The talent acquisition team must use this ideal candidate profile as a handbook to review the resumes and CVs of organic traffic in their applicant tracking systems, and in doing outreach via Linkedin or other tools.
When creating your hiring process for the role, return to your ideal candidate profile. Touch base with the experts who are doing similar work on your team and who have experience with those specific skills or technology. Return to the performance reviews. What do they do well? What projects did they crush? What are their strong points? You want to find more of the same in the candidate you hire, so work with them to create an assessment that acts as a screening tool for candidates before they walk through the doors of your office for that all important face-to-face interview.
Using the same ideal candidate profile, build out interview questions FOR EVERY INTERVIEWER. Do not deviate. Shadow your interviewers to make sure they’re following the script. Make sure you’ve created a rubric of correct answers. HR or the recruitment team should handle asking behavioral interview questions — the only exception here might be allowing the hiring manager or main stakeholder to do so as well, but even then, have a rubric of acceptable, qualifying answers, and follow it.
Rigidity in your hiring process, especially when it comes to vetting, sourcing, and hiring diverse candidates, is all important. This doesn’t mean that your interviews can’t be conversational but with this method, and if your questions deviate, they will deviate in the right direction because there’s a framework to follow.
What if you do all of this, and you still end up with less diverse candidates at the end of the funnel (in offer, or final interview stages)? Sometimes, you will. Make no mistake, our struggles in identifying diverse candidate pools is a result of institutionalized prejudices in our society. There ARE more Asian and white males who have the privilege of being exposed to STEM based education paths from a very young age. These disparities manifest in the demographic distributions of the candidates you’re charged to mine to fill your roles.
The struggle is real.
However, the struggle is no match for the impact you will see not only in your ability to get diverse candidates into your pipeline using the methods above, but in the overall quality of the candidates you hire across the board.
