Diverse From the Start: What a Holistic Recruiting Strategy Looks Like

BY Emily Nonko | July 28, 2020

Recruitment is the first step for creating racial, gender and economic diversity within a workplace, but it cannot stand alone in fostering inclusion. Rather, recruitment should be seen as the launching-off point to a wealth of strategies that bring in, retain and empower a diverse employee base.

A panel of experts on recruitment convened at From Day One’s July virtual conference, The New Push for Workplace Equity, to discuss how recruiting can come out of its silo and serve as a powerful first step to more equitable workplace cultures. “We’ve been looking at the full employee journey,” said PaShon Mann, VP of talent acquisition for Comcast. “Many folks in talent acquisition focus on that front end, on hiring, but really you want to look at the sourcing stage and all the way through to onboarding, development and promotion.”

Comcast applies a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) lens throughout an employee’s lifespan with the company, according to Mann, and does so with support from top leadership. Al Cave, national practice leader at Apprenti, stressed the need for buy-in across a company: “If you have the leader of the organization at the table, everybody else will come along,” he said. “You absolutely need the head of the organization fully bought in and supportive on an ongoing basis.”

Once leadership is onboard, the company can invest in tools that support holistic recruitment. Mann suggested creating processes to track feedback from the employee after they’ve been hired. Comcast also partnered its talent-acquisition and talent-management teams to ensure the processes are linked with similar DEI values.

Crystal Andrews Banks, diversity and inclusion director at Ulta Beauty, explained the company started a “Champion’s Network” to make sure people feel they belong within the company and help them identify opportunities for growth. She added that company culture is a draw for prospective hires, with open communication between the chief executive and employees, diversity-focused events, and learning from brand partners.

From Day One's panel of recruitment experts, led in discussion by Emily Nordquist, upper left, senior program manager of the Baumhart Center at Loyola University Chicago

Marquis Miller, chief diversity officer for the City of Chicago, offered a public-sector perspective of improving workplace culture to retain diverse employment. He noted that Chicago began looking at “new ideas of wellness and how that wellness is actually connected to professional development.” The city is exploring establishing “City Resource Groups” that help city residents identify career paths in municipal employment.

At Apprenti, an organization that helps democratize tech-job opportunities, the key to holistic recruitment was changing the attitudes around who’s best qualified for tech positions. “Our belief is that far too many companies … rely on far too narrow a pipeline,” said Cave. He pointed out that last year, there were 4 million tech jobs open, but colleges produced only 320,000 degrees in computer science or engineering.

“We try to recruit from the broadest, most comprehensive body of entities and sources as possible,” Cave said, noting the company works with community organizations, educational institutions, government and business entities, while also sponsoring and speaking at various events.

Panelists delved into more specific strategies of accessing equity in the recruitment and hiring process. Cynthia Hedricks, chief analytics officer for SkillSurvey, a data-driven recruitment consultancy, spoke to the importance of creating, documenting and following a consistent hiring process. Structured interviews are also important. “It will help your hiring managers to make sure questions are job-related and consistently asked of all applicants,” she said. If a company uses personality assessments, she added, that company should speak with its vendor to make sure it monitors for biases.

Emily Nordquist, the panel’s moderator and senior program manager with Baumhart Center of Loyola University Chicago, pointed out that job candidates pick up on the signals about a company’s commitment to diversity from the get-go: “Who’s on that interview panel? Who are they seeing in the office? Who are they connecting with?” she asked. “That can have a huge impact on people’s psychology as they walk into the room.”

Apprenti developed a multi-point assessment model that measures aptitude, rather than specific educational skills. Structured interviews measure behavioral and interpersonal attributes, as opposed to education background or professional history. “At each point of the process we’re looking to expand the pool as much as we can and assess aptitude, and nothing else,” Cave explained.

Mann, of Comcast, pointed out that anti-bias training should be used for employees who conduct interviews: “We could have the most beautiful process, but if we have folks with unconscious and conscious biases it’s not going to matter how we design things.” Mann also believes such training should be revisited by companies on an ongoing basis to reflect new research and information on how biases play out.

Many panelists noted that COVID-19 turned recruitment and employment upside down, given the impact on both the economy and the physical workplace, but could still serve as an opportunity to revisit strategies for holistic recruitment. “Historically there’s been a bias against unemployed applicants, but right now there’s a segment of the workforce who’s lost their jobs during the pandemic,” Hedricks said. “We can revisit our biases, turn everything on its side and re-look at it.”

Nordquist ended the panel with a “power round” question on where companies can start when it comes to holistic recruiting. Cave emphasized that companies need to begin diversity work within the internal culture, before turning to talent acquisition. Hedricks suggested that as the workforce starts to return to the office after stay-at-home measures, companies should consider task forces, surveys or forums in which employees can speak honestly about their workplace culture.

Andrews Banks of Ulta Beauty stressed the importance of the company’s leaders getting on the same page. “Ground yourself in the why,” she said. “Ground yourself in representation data and figure out what success looks like to you as an organization, then how you can connect the dots to your future aspirational goals.”

Emily Nonko is a Brooklyn, NY-based reporter who writes about real estate, architecture, urbanism and design. Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, Curbed and other publications.

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The Secrets to Building a Better, More Purposeful Team

Many companies have a Cyclops problem, often narrow-mindedly seeing only what’s in front of them. So then how do businesses today build diverse, inclusive, purposeful teams? The answers come from a few different sources, according to the lively and informative panel “Building a Purposeful Team” at the From Day One conference, featuring experts with deep knowledge of creating diverse teams. But let’s start with the benefits: not only do inclusive teams bring a greater breadth of knowledge and backgrounds helpful for finding solutions, but for the bean counters among us, diversity also has a significant impact on the bottom line. Khalil Smith, practice lead of diversity and inclusion at the NeuroLeadership Institute, pointed out that diverse teams generate returns inside their organizations, highlighting that a large percentage of patents are developed by immigrants. (Research proves this out: More than one-third of individuals who have contributed to technological innovation in the U.S. are born outside the country, according to Fortune.) Companies that pursue diversity become more attractive to a broader array of job seekers, as well. Job candidates armed with that knowledge embrace businesses that champion diversity and tend to turn their backs on those stuck in the 20th century. “Candidates are doing the research,” said Jennifer Abbondanza, vice president of corporate initiatives for NBCUniversal’s Office of Diversity & Inclusion. “They know who gets it and are doing inclusion,” but it’s still the company’s responsibility to create an environment where people of all types feel comfortable enough to speak their mind. “That’s what is going to curate the best ideas and decision-making,” she said. Attracting a Broad Base of Candidates Increasing the talent pool starts with the job description, said Penda Aiken, president of leading staffing agency Penda Aiken Inc., and this is reinforced by the company mission and description. “The culture also needs to make employees feel like the company has social responsibility. It goes beyond lip service,” she said, pointing out the recent internal crisis at CBS, which saw the ousting of  longtime executives. “What is the company culture and how is that being backed by leadership?” How to Communicate Company Culture Projecting this culture—and living by its high standards—is crucial, said David Raper, senior executive of corporate citizenship at IBM, global markets. “It starts at the top with the view of not just the company, but what sort of society are we as a company creating, internally and externally?” The next trick, then? Building processes to carry out the mission. Harnessing Data to Make Decisions Over at NBCUniversal, Abbondanza uses data to inform hiring culture, and works with the talent-acquisition team to research populations they want to better understand and around which they can develop strategies to counter unconscious bias. But data, of course, isn’t the end-all, be-all. As NeuroLeadership’s Smith said, there is bias inherent in AI and technology, which is primarily created by young to middle-aged white males. The people who create AI might not know where their biases are hiding. As machines churn through data sets,  even that data is consciously curated by humans. “We can’t assume that artificial intelligence or machine learning is a silver bullet or will solve for all of [these unconscious biases],” he said. Training Against Bias While corporate training has long had a bad reputation for being dull or boring or locking people in a room against their will, unconscious-bias training is gaining traction—and yet still more can be done. Aiken says the diversity-recruiting process can run into a roadblock. Her staffing firm might find the best talent and arrange the interview, but ultimately the hiring manager or team decides who’s getting the gig. If hiring managers fall prey to their own biases, then “everything that’s being done to promote diversity and inclusion is for naught,” she said. The challenge with difference-focused training  is that it often backfires. Research shows that it can infuriate the people it’s intended to educate—white men—while highlighting differences rather than bringing people together. The counterpoint, said Smith, is to be deliberate about training and create common goals: What are you working on collectively, and what are you coming together to do? “If you have a brain, you have bias,” he said, but if you’re not aware of your biases, you can’t mitigate them. Keeping Your Employees Happy Moderator Kristen Bellstrom, deputy digital editor at Fortune, posed this question to the group: Even when you hire the right people, why do companies still have trouble keeping women and people of color on their teams, and what can they do to fix it? Companies have to think beyond bean bags and cold-brew coffee, and inclusion goes beyond an open-office floor plan, said Aiken. What matters more is how people are treated. “Communication is critical,” she said. Successful companies emphasize social activity, and ask how they can contribute to the surrounding community. During his experience at IBM and previously at Housing Works, Raper said a culture of inclusion came from the top down. “It really did matter to the CEO. They talked about it all the time, and there were clear values at each company.” Another valuable idea is to hold an open-door policy. Ultimately, it’s about transmitting this diverse thinking into the DNA of the company. “Whether you’re a CEO or a person at the company, it’s about how to bake it into your behaviors,” he said. Abbondanza seconded the importance of communication from the top. At NBCUniversal, they have a skills-building Talent Lab and diversity elements included in their programs: “There are lot of tools in the toolkit,” she said. No one knows exactly which one is working the most, but you need to use them all.” Busting the Old Boys’ Network Where did you go to school? Who do you know? Are you someone I might want to get a drink with later? While traditional job-hiring practices can lean on antiquated questions with inherent biases for wealth and background, diving into the data can take the conversation one step further. NBCUniversal creates a healthy sense of competition toward its diversity goals, said Abbondanza, by stacking up data across teams to see how each fares. But as each panelist elaborated, the broader picture is to think about how we, as individuals, can participate in an expansion of the workforce—and beyond. Aiken noted that the primary elections, occurring the same day as the conference, will see more women of color than ever run for Senate and other political roles. In the end, creating better teams is less about networking with the same groups, and more about creating footholds in a diverse range of other networks. And that’s what they call breaking new ground. Kara Cutruzzula is a writer living in Fort Greene. Her articles, essays, and plays can be found here.

Kara Cutruzzula November 18, 2018

How Hiring Managers Can Play a Stronger Role in Attracting Diverse Talent

If your company doesn’t have much of a public reputation–perhaps you build urban infrastructure or set up cell-tower networks–do you have a strategy for helping job seekers envision themselves in your organization? According to a panel of HR and talent-acquisition leaders, hiring managers are your best asset. “Hiring managers make or break the deal,” said Dominique Brewer, the U.S. head of culture and engagement for the pharmaceutical company Takeda. “They need to embrace the differences and engage.” Brewer and her co-panelists participated in a webinar titled “How Hiring Managers Can Play a Stronger Role in Attracting Diverse Talent in 2023 and Beyond,” which I moderated, hosted by From Day One as part of its January virtual conference on talent acquisition during uncertain times. Show Hiring Managers the Types of Diversity They Should Be Seeking Before you deploy your hiring managers for recruiting, before the interview stage, show them the type of diversity your company needs. Diversity is not just race and gender, but also includes background and ways of thinking and neurodiversity, said Brewer, and all the intersections our identities create. Age, said the panelists, is one that continues to be overlooked. “We did a global study, and [found that] about half of global companies are not aware of and don’t include age in their thinking about [diversity, equity, and inclusion],” said Heather Tinsley-Fix, senior advisor for financial resilience at AARP. “Age diversity is really great at an organization. You can leverage the technical skills of your early career workers, and then the systems-level thinking of your later- and mid-career workers.” Jane Curran, the head of talent acquisition (TA) at the commercial real-estate firm JLL, said her company favors skill over pedigree. Where a candidate went to school or the last company on their resume, “those things have a shelf life, and have very little correlation to your success in life,” she said. “We’re trying to focus on hiring more from a skills-based selection criteria.” Joy Johnson, chief operating officer of HR at the global engineering firm Black & Veatch, said her team is “focusing on skills that we consider ‘fungible’ skills, that, as the market changes, we could offer career opportunities and quickly reskill a technical skill into a non-technical skill.” “Be open minded,” said Judith Almendra, VP of global human capital and TA at the customer-experience tech company TTEC. “The right person may look exactly like or be very different from what you initially thought.” To this end, Almendra uses artificial intelligence (AI) to train hiring managers on inclusive interviewing styles. What Hiring Managers Have That Recruiters Don’t Hiring managers know something recruiters don’t: What it’s like to work on their team. Cindy Alisesky, the VP of HR transformation and pharmaceuticals company GSK (formerly GlaxoSmithKline), encouraged hiring managers to become skilled storytellers to draw in new hires. For example, Alisesky talked about a recent graduate who joined her team right as Covid sent everyone into quarantine. The new hire was left living alone in a city and far from family. “We worked very, very hard to make sure that she was taken care of, from both a mental and physical perspective as we continued our work,” Alisesky said. “That involved reaching out to her periodically, making sure she was making meals and communicating with her family, etc., and all of that created such a sense of community. She successfully completed the task, we successfully completed the project.” Anecdotes like this can be a compelling way to illustrate the employee experience. Unsupported claims about inclusion or even data that describes employee sentiment can’t achieve the same effect. “There’s nothing more valuable than testimonials of people that have really experienced those things,” Almendra added. Showing Up for Recruiting When your company is invisible to the average consumer, putting hiring managers, not just recruiters, on the front lines can help potential candidates imagine themself contributing to an organization and belonging there. “You don’t know that when you turn the light on, or you turn on your faucet, that we’ve probably had something to do with that,” said Johnson, alluding to her company’s infrastructure projects, but that is a compelling way to think about one’s job. Panelists recommended returning to some traditional ways of recruiting that were abandoned during the pandemic: in-person career fairs, university presentations, and meet-and-greets at local restaurants or community events. Alisesky considers in-person recruiting events “a lost art,” and therefore a competitive advantage. A company’s employer brand “lives with every employee and how every employee shows up to these events,” she said, and is an opportunity to start meaningful relationships with job seekers. Even better if those hiring managers are equipped with those storytelling skills. “[Job seekers] want to speak to the person that they’re potentially going to be working for,” said Alisesky. Brewer said that’s why Takeda leans heavily on referral networks to bring in new talent. An insider endorsement goes a long way. At Black & Veatch, Johnson invests in long-term relationships with professional groups, like National Society of Black Engineers and the Society of Women Engineers, which, she said, consistently produce great new hires because the relationship has been so long-lasting. “We have to work extra hard to tell our story because all of us work at amazing companies that attract great talent,” said JLL’s Curran. “But hiring managers have to play, they have to get involved. It’s a team sport, the more they’re involved, the faster we find talent, and the better talent we attract.” Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance reporter who covers the future of work, HR, recruiting, DEI, and women’s experiences in the workplace. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Fast Company, Quartz at Work, Digiday’s Worklife, and Food Technology, among others.

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How to Recruit for Potential Rather Than Pedigree

As the head of talent acquisition for the FBI for the past four years, Peter Sursi realized that the bureau's career portal was persistently attracting the same kind of candidate. “A lot of white guys find their way to us,” he said. So Sursi reasoned that the task of the FBI’s recruiters was to change the model from the inside. If they wanted to have a diverse pipeline at all, the talent team would have to be proactive in wooing diverse candidates. Andrew Myers, founder of the early-career jobs platform RippleMatch, witnessed something similar, albeit in a totally different context. When he was a student, he was watching his friends whose parents worked in tech and finance set them up with internships. “I would go to the career fair and take out my paper resume,” he said, recalling that the process was inefficient and messy, “and that was at Yale!” When he went home to Colorado, he found himself among a more diverse pool of applicants, both in terms of race and socio-economic status, but when those candidates did not come from a school targeted by employers, Myers recalled, their job applications would disappear into a black hole. Sursi and Myers spoke on a panel of talent-acquisition experts focused on how companies can get an advantage in the red-hot labor market by recruiting for potential rather than pedigree, part of From Day One’s virtual September conference on new ideas and tactics for diversity hiring. The premise of the conversation was that employers have relied too much on narrow sets of credentials, driven by a tendency to play it safe and go with what has worked in the past. That won’t work anymore, especially at a time when the definition of diversity in the workforce is in flux. Once it applied mainly to gender and ethnicity, but the spirit of inclusiveness is expanding to embrace people without a four-year college degree, people with disabilities, those who are caretakers, and workers who don't necessarily live in the main corporate or tech hubs. After all, if a company's diversity effort simply consists of hiring a person of color with a STEM degree from Stanford, we can hardly say they're challenging the status quo. That's when technology can work in synergy with a more humanistic approach, rooted in empathy, open-mindedness, and curiosity. “We have nothing to do with our privilege,” said PaShon Mann, VP of talent acquisition at Comcast, “we were just born in a certain situation.” When Listing Skills, Understand That Skills Are Not Eternal  In the contemporary job market, especially in tech fields or anything with a strong digital component, many credentials a candidate has on a resume are likely to be outdated within a year due to the ever-evolving nature of the field. “Be open-minded about what we want about the position: Can you teach the most important skills to build that role?” said Mann. “Hiring for potential, for me, is to go to non-traditional places and sources to find folks, and really be open-minded in the interview.” These places include state schools, historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), and community colleges. Experts speak about improving the talent pipeline, top row from left: moderator Lydia Dishman of Fast Company, PaShon Mann of Comcast, and Liz Freedman of IHG Hotels & Resorts. Bottom row, from left: Jeremy Schiff of RecruitBot, Peter Sursi of the FBI, and Andrew Myers of RippleMatch (Image by From Day One) The speakers suggested that employers should be more practical in their expectations about candidate qualifications. Liz Freedman, head of talent, leadership and DEI at IHG Hotels & Resorts, described conversations with managers to narrow down the competencies listed for a position. “We have a laundry list of things, and we should be asking, “What is the absolute requirement?” she said. “It's three to five things maximum. Let's have a reality check on that.” In considering candidate skills, employers should recognize the prevalence of stereotypical assumptions, for example that older candidates lack relevant technical skills or are less apt to learn them. Or that younger candidates don’t have the skills associated with maturity. “I think we don't talk enough about different generations and being inclusive and respectful of all of them,” said Comcast's Mann. “It's interesting that people forget about that. That's an under-discussed part of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). I had one DEI professional tell me that everybody gets old, so it's not that sort of a thing.” Yes, Data Is Your Friend Reducing the number of requirements, pointed out Jeremy Schiff, CEO of RecruitBot, a machine-learning platform focusing on talent acquisition and retention with an eye for diversity, represents a challenge: how does one calibrate between getting enough candidates that are truly relevant while broadening the pool at the same time? “Hiring managers have a hard time squaring that circle,” Schiff said. His company has a rating system comparable to the one Netflix uses for movie and TV recommendations that goes from 1 to 5, which can then detect a pattern in the recruiter’s choices and present choices based on what the employer deems relevant. “It's easier to articulate that you like a candidate that's a good fit for the role, as opposed to describing what to look for,” said Schiff. Similarly, Myers sees the limited usefulness of resumes and LinkedIn profiles, especially among early-career people, since what they list often doesn’t paint a thorough picture of the candidate. “By pulling in way more data, you can have more companies comfortable with having fewer hard filters,” he said, adding that this applies to pedigrees too. “A software developer from a state school or an HBCU can perform just as well as someone from Stanford, but you need retention data to dispel the myths and prejudices related to pedigrees.” In Screening, AI Can Be a Help, Not a Hindrance  “AI can do a lot of damage to diversity efforts if you're not thoughtful,” warned Schiff. “Think from the bottom up to make sure that machine learning is focused on the right attributes. We continue to double down on it [at RecruitBot], with specific messaging for specific groups, leaning into going to find that talent rather than having the talent find you,” Schiff said. A lot of it boils down to changing the mindset of hiring managers. Schiff reported being aware of hiring managers filling in spreadsheets with LinkedIn links and asking recruiters to find candidates like the ones they listed, rather than creating a dialogue with recruiters about the criteria needed for the job. “Hiring managers and recruiters can collaborate more effectively, and machine learning and AI can help,” he said, adding that AI, if trained properly, could automate the filling-the-spreadsheet component of the talent search. Expect Some Resistance Yet persuading hiring managers to change their habits can be a challenge. “Part of our journey with the hiring manager is that the crappy system selected them,” said Sursi, noting that the implementation of a new system might be perceived as a slight against the managers' own qualifications. “We need to talk about evolution as the world is changing.” He continued, “I do try to anchor them to all the things that have changed that are super obvious, but we need to evolve because the world is evolving.” “I am OK with hiring managers to feel a little bit of pain,” said Freedman. “They're searching for a unicorn. We want them to be uncomfortable in order for them to be more open for a different way to think about talent and where we source.” Quipped Schiff: “So you're looking for a purple spotted unicorn? Maybe remove spots from the requirements!” Angelica Frey is a writer and a translator based in Milan and Brooklyn.

Angelica Frey October 04, 2021