Make sure your recruiting strategy and hiring process are helping, rather than hindering, your DEI initiatives and ambitions.
That’s a point Cynthia Owyoung makes in her brand-new book All Are Welcome: How to Build a Real Workplace Culture of Inclusion That Delivers Results.
“After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, a lot of companies were galvanized to rethink their efforts around diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging,” says Cynthia, the vice president of inclusion, equity, and belonging for financial services company Robinhood and founder of Breaking Glass Forums, a company that works with organizations to bring more diverse leadership into their ranks. “Now companies are being held to account for those commitments.”
When it comes to creating a diverse company culture, recruitment strategies have the power to unearth untapped talent or turn off potential candidates. Cynthia shares five of her suggestions for ensuring your recruitment tactics line up with your diversity goals.
1. Rethink what makes a successful candidate
A job description encapsulates how your organization thinks about a role. But it can also keep you from achieving your diversity goals.
Some people rule themselves out of contention when they read a job description that they can’t relate to. So, for example, a graduate of a Historically Black College and University (HBCU) may refrain from applying to your organization if they perceive you to be looking for an Ivy League degree.
“If you have misguided beliefs about what a candidate needs to succeed inside your company,” Cynthia says, “that will show up in the job description, and that’s what ends up limiting your pool of candidates who will apply.”
In All Are Welcome, Cynthia writes: “Many times, we include preferences like industry experience or educational backgrounds, but we present them as requirements. If they are truly optional, state that explicitly.”
For example, does a candidate really need a college degree? Skills and competencies such as technical proficiency, leadership acumen, and initiative may be a better predictor of a candidate’s success.
Cynthia points out that a lot of tech companies have started removing college degree requirements for certain roles. Likewise some companies are even highlighting what qualifications you don’t need. Joseph Jenkins, vice president of sales at Utah-based software company Eddy, wrote: “At Eddy, we hire based on potential, skill set, mindset, and ability to learn. We don’t require a college degree or a specific number of years experience.”
2. Think skills, not industry, when sourcing candidates
If you’re only recruiting at industry-related events, you’re likely to find candidates much like the ones you already have. To reach a broader spectrum of candidates, Cynthia suggests, cast your recruiting net outside of your own industry into ones where candidates may have transferable skills.
For example, if you’re trying to hire for a customer service role, it’s not necessarily the industry experience that matters, but rather the candidate’s desire to help people and their ability to build lasting relationships, Cynthia says. Once you’ve narrowed down the competencies that you need, consider other fields or environments where you might find people who possess them.
One company Cynthia worked with found that librarians, for example, with their focus on serving the community, had a lot of the skills deemed important for customer service. The library, she says, was “an untapped field that had a lot of folks that actually made great customer service agents.”
3. Prevent bias with a structured and consistent interview process
Unconscious bias can creep into any interview situation, but there are ways to minimize its effects.
When interviewing candidates, Cynthia says, make sure the questions get to the heart of the candidates’ skills and competencies. Also, create a system that ensures that all candidates for a role are assessed against consistent criteria. To do this, Cynthia suggests:
- Creating a database of questions and giving each member of your interview team a competency to assess. The team can meet before interviews to hash out which questions from the database each member will consistently ask that will effectively evaluate those desired skills.
- Discussing what you are looking for in terms of answers. For example, how does a great answer differ from a merely good answer? “Everybody can weigh in on that so that we have shared alignment around what we’re really looking for,” Cynthia says.
Remember that your interview team will also give candidates some insight into your company culture. “Make the interview team as diverse as possible,” Cynthia writes in her book, “so that the people you’re interviewing can see themselves at your firm.”
Once interviews are complete, have a debriefing session in which each person on the interviewing team gives feedback that documents their impressions with clear examples of why they are rating a candidate positively or negatively. Having occasional audits of interview feedback can help you determine if your interview team is providing valid and unbiased justifications to back up their opinions about candidates.
4. Let a hiring committee give an objective view
Some companies implement hiring committees who take the feedback from the interview team and make the hiring decision. The hiring committee doesn’t come into contact with the candidates at all, but rather depends on the interview team’s feedback to make an unbiased decision.
“When people know that their interview feedback is going to be seen by this hiring committee body,” Cynthia says, “they tend to be motivated to actually spend more time and effort into putting in clear, consistent, and concise feedback.”
The hiring committee can consist of experienced interviewers who have hired a lot of people in the past or employees in leadership roles in the company. The team can also be cross-functional. What’s important is that the team is objective and evaluates candidates in a way that is standard across the organization.
Of course when pulling together a hiring committee you have to incentivize people who already have a lot on their plates to take their role in the hiring process seriously.
To do that, Cynthia says, make it clear that serving on a hiring committee is a privilege that will be recognized and rewarded in the company. You might, for example, include giving it weight in the performance review process and offering a bonus or other financial incentive for playing such an important role in the company’s recruitment process.
5. Present an inclusive workplace culture
Candidates know they have choices and they pay attention to how you describe the workplace culture. If it doesn’t sound inclusive, candidates from underrepresented groups may pass on your opportunity.
For example, a phrase like “work hard, play hard” may sound exciting to one person, but be off-putting to another. A caregiver, a working parent, or someone with other family obligations may even interpret it as meaning they won’t be given the latitude to manage those responsibilities effectively — having to put in long hours or take calls at all times of the night when they have limited bandwidth to do so.
“Words like ‘ninja’ or ‘rock star’ may also turn women off and prevent them from applying,” Cynthia writes in All Are Welcome. “Similarly, be aware that when you include phrases like ‘insanely focused’ or ‘join our tribe,’ it can feel exclusionary or offensive to some, in this case people with mental health issues or indigenous peoples, respectively.”
You also want your organization to be seen in an inclusive light before you need to fill the next position. No one knows better how inclusive your company’s environment is than the employees themselves. If they’re willing to share their experiences publicly, such as via social media, that’s worth more than gold, Cynthia says.
Final thoughts: First impressions can have a lasting impact
An organization’s recruitment process often serves as an introduction between that company and the diverse talent it wants to attract.
The way Cynthia sees it, companies have a choice. They can instill new practices into their recruitment strategy and create a pipeline of diverse talent that can be tapped over and over again. Or they can stick with the status quo, which will likely produce the same results — and types of candidates — that their organization already has.
Cynthia is committed to helping organizations who choose the first option. “My hope,” she says, “is that the book helps companies figure out not just their short-term journey, but the long term path.”
*Image from CynthiaOwyoung.com
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