Read the Room and Reboot.

There is a worldwide movement at the moment of people considering quitting their jobs. Some have already jumped ship and the pipeline of passive candidates has never been higher. A report from McKinsey suggests that behind the Great Resignation, also known as the Great Discontent, is a lack of understanding by employers around the reasons their employees want to bail.

To burst the corporate rainbow and unicorn bubble, in simple terms they are not reading their rooms correctly

Today, organisations are being offered a golden opportunity to listen attentively and to address issues that plague corporate cultures. The pain points for employees are around flexibility, fairness, recognition, trust, belonging, career opportunities and empathetic leadership, all of which are hard to measure. What is clear, is that focusing on old school benefits on their own is no longer enough. Action is needed and pretty quickly too.

It means reading the room, pulling out the plug, returning to factory settings and rebooting our systems.

Implementation gap

The data around the relationship between inclusive workplaces and business success is compelling. If you want a diverse and inclusive workplace you can't do it without diverse talent. To attract that talent your recruitment processes have to be inclusive. It’s actually quite logical, but many hiring managers would rather kiss a porcupine than change. Despite leadership statements and a lot of talk, the pace of the walk would frustrate an aging snail.  

85% of employers and hiring managers indicate that increasing diversity in their organisations is important, only half have established the necessary programmes to make this happen according to research carried out by Robert Walters. A report from Smart Recruiters in October 2021, suggest that budgets haven’t changed for 10 years.

 What is Inclusive recruitment?

Inclusive recruitment is the process of attracting, sourcing, screening , interviewing, and hiring talent from diverse backgrounds. It is about understanding and recognising how candidates who are different can add value to the business. It means no more candidate cloning, which tends to be the mainstay of many recruitment processes with all the talk around "cultural fit."

Herein lies the problem.

Back to basics

At one time I assumed that anyone involved in the hiring process knew there was a list of protected categories. Silly me. Let's cover that now. It is illegal to discriminate against candidates on the certain grounds in most geographies. These include: gender, age, race, physical ability, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, national origin, veteran status and genetic status. To do so exposes an organisation to the risk of legal action.

8 best practices for inclusive recruitment

Here are some best recommended practices to achieve inclusive recruitment. Sadly, even these basic suggestions have been met with reactions which imply I would be better occupied rebristling my broom.

1. Know your numbers

Designing an inclusive hiring process is actually not the first step. You would be surprised how many organisations rely more on anecdote than anec-data. It is definitely true if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. Organisations which don't seek hiring and candidate engagement metrics, are never going to know which issues cause their pain points. Or what they do well so they can do more of the same. Any action will be based on guess work which which can waste time and resources.

2. Build it and they will come

When I work with organisations the first thing I do is audit their employer brand. By this I mean check out and research everything I can see and can find in the public domain (and also everything I can't see and find.) This is usually a good litmus test of what is going on behind the scenes. If there are cases of "gender" or an other kind of washing, that is not too difficult to verify via a bit of deeper digging and a few phone calls. If I can do that - so can candidates. It's not exactly deep cover Mata Hari stuff. In fact I always recommend it to job seekers.

Making sure your Employer Brand visibly demonstrates a diverse and inclusive workplace culture is vital. This will be reflected in every interaction your organisation has in the public domain, including everything associated with your product branding.

The process involves scrutinising all content, whether text, videos, adverts and images on your web site, careers’ pages, and all social media. You need impeccable ratings on sites such as Glassdoor. In today’s social proofing cultures, if someone checks out a pizzeria where they spend one hour and €20, do you think they won't check out a potential employer where they spend 40 hours a week? Exactly. Not forgetting you and all the people involved in the process. The personal brands of members of your HR department will also play a role. 

Make your benefits clearly visible. This is no longer about Friday's open bar, but increasingly around flex and remote options. Demonstrate boldly your commitment to being an open and psychologically secure workplace that values difference.

If you don’t do this, the impact of everything you do will be diluted. 33% of candidates are influenced by an organisation’s career page. (JobVite)

3. Create a diverse recruitment team

Creating a diverse recruitment team can the biggest hurdle,when HR and recruitment functions globally have a diversity problem. They tend to be “pink silos,” that is female dominated. The feminisation of HR has been taking place slowly over the past 40 years. Although higher levels of men are being attracted to the profession recently, they represent on average about 20% of entry level intake, despite occupying around 60% of senior roles. Go figure.  

In the US almost two-thirds (65%) of HR professionals identified as white. The next highest representations were Asian at 12% and Hispanic at 10%.

Diversifying HR itself should be a priority.

4. Train your team

The line “if you have a brain, you have a bias” means that at every point of interaction there is a high risk your process will be impacted by one of the 150 plus cognitive biases. Avoid demonising the existence of bias and monitor concerns and resistance closely. People don't need fixing. Systems do. Bias is normal.

The chances of us being able to leave our biases at the office door are zero when they are so deeply embedded in our wider cultures. We are bombarded every day with content and experiences which influence us. When people talk about eliminating unconscious bias that can be misleading. They can only be managed.

The first step to tackle that challenge, is to make sure anyone involved in the process has had awareness training around unconscious bias. Research from 3PlusInternational indicates that only 50% of recruiters have had unconscious bias training. I suspect that despite our best efforts those numbers are not reliable and it could well be even less.

Many HR and recruitment professionals seek candidates within their networks but most of us don’t have diverse networks. They may be positively influenced by the school or university they went to, or their work experience in certain companies. They may have unconscious race or gender bias or gravitate towards younger candidates (age bias).  Check yourself here by taking the Harvard Implicit Bias Test.

A good example of confirmation / affinity / conformity bias in action came to my attention on Twitter. A woman submitted a fake resume and received 60% response rate by citing top tech companies in her career history.

 Research from Harvard Business School suggests that applicants from minority groups who have “whitened” their names on their CVs are twice as likely to get calls for interviews than candidates whose race might be evident via their names. A Catalyst study shows that older female candidates are called back for a second interview at half the rate of younger candidates (gender ageism).

Unconscious bias awareness training should be ongoing and not confined to a one-off box checking lunch and learn programme.

 5. Extend your reach

One of the best ways to increase the diversity of your talent pipeline is to extend the reach of your sourcing strategies rather than relying on the old tried, tired and tested methodologies. This tends to produce the same type of applicant. When an increasing number of organisations are trying to attract the same candidates, the competition for some demographics (women for example) end up with all organisations searching in the same narrow field.  

It's important to “fish where the are fish” and expand your sourcing strategies to include a wider range of networks and universities, different job boards, and creating new strategic partnerships to widen your networks and visibility.  

 As I discuss in a post “ Is it time to rename the hidden job market” research from Payscale suggests that “white men disproportionately win job referrals.”  This effectively excludes other groups via embedded systemic unconscious bias.

They carry on to say: “Out of 100 referred employees, 44 will tend to be white men, 22 will be white women, 18 will be men of color and 16 will be women of color, the research authors pointed out. By comparison, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, white men represent only 34 percent of the U.S. labor market, which means white men are 129 percent more likely to be in a pool of 100 referred employees than what demographics suggest they should be.”

If you have an employee referral incentive scheme ask for diverse referrals to be included.   

6. AI support

Many software companies have built enterprise solutions to facilitate inclusive recruitment to fill this gap in the market. Other tools facilitate removal of personal data to give blind CVs, sourcing and scraping tools, online assessment tests, one-way interviews, and inclusive writing and editing software. Research from Hiring Solutions company Harver shared that KPMG  attracted more female candidates and hired 44% more women using an AI assessment tool.   

Check that your software selection is monitored regularly for bias because software is written by humans. AI recruitment tools can play a valuable role but even software can have bias, in tools such as automated interviews where German researchers discovered background bias. So, pay attention.

And don’t forget that ATS parameters are NOT set by bots – but by people.

These solutions are tools only and although they support the management of bias, the hiring manager can still make a biased decision.

7. Deepen your pool of diverse talent

You are probably only fishing for your talent in the equivalent of a goldfish bowl. When building your talent pool, make an audit of which demographics you are missing and try to include those target groups in your strategy. You need the ocean.

The first place where bias creeps in in the hiring process is typically in the scoping interview with the hiring manager. Many HMs give recruiters an inflated mandate, asking for specific and narrowly defined qualifications. We ask them to give up a superfluous qualification, not donate an organ. This can include a fixed number of years’ experience and academic qualifications. Some candidates can gain the same level of experience in 1 year as another in 5. It’s important to focus on competence.

There is also a tendency to look for continuous linear experience (unemployment bias) and judge candidates with career gaps or experience gained in non-corporate roles more harshly. Remember also to check in your ATS for candidates from other searches who may fit the bill. Target returners or ex-employees. There are many ways to mix up your methodologies to increase the chances of attracting candidates from other demographics.

We are in a time of a candidate driven market when organisations could bridge the skill gap and look for “teachability” by involving Talent Development in the assessment process. Ultimately it may be more cost effective to offer support to teach hard skills such as languages, or software skills, than to continue the search for purple squirrels in a talent pool which is drying up.

8. Diversify participants

To increase the chances of building inclusive recruitment processes you need the involvement of different players. This gives you the chance of avoiding group-think to get a wider range of views from individuals with different perceptions, outlooks and expectations.

An inclusive hiring process should be collaborative with recruitment nudges built in at every stage to keep everyone on track and to give feedback. In the process this can be reviewing job postings and CVs or participating in the interview process. In homogeneous organisations and functions, you may want to consider bringing in external support.

What next?

Building an inclusive recruitment process take time. It involves the three pillars of organisational change: leadership commitment, systemic change and individual engagement. They are all heavily connected. When employees are not aligned with their leadership and the systems that sustain an organisation then, this leads to what we are seeing today when employees are either leaving or actively checking the market.

If you don’t know how you your organisation is doing, ask for feedback especially from candidates and your current employees. Establish why your employees leave, carried out with an anonymous questionnaire, if necessary, but just as importantly why they stay.

All of these are small tips and there are many others. But all organisations have to start somewhere. It's about reading the talent room correctly and re-booting.

This should be a unique opportunity for change. It needs to be seized.

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My goal is to increase the number of gender balanced, diverse and inclusive workplaces where everyone feels secure and reaches their potential.

⚽ Please share this newsletter with your HR contacts.

⚽ Unconscious biases affect all our decisions, but it is possible to manage them. Make your company more inclusive, and take a hard look at your hiring processes. Read more here.

⚽ Want to strengthen and diversify the talent pipeline n in your organisation, check out the 3Plus Corporate Services