HIRING FOR DIVERSITY

In collaboration with Khymberly Booth of Davis Booth Consulting.

When focused on hiring for diversity there are three key things a company should focus on to ensure heightened employee/candidate engagement and equity in the process:

1. Understand the data, internal and external - know what your current population looks like and the availability of diverse candidates is within the recruiting area and specialized field.  Work to ensure that your candidate pool is at least at or preferably above availability for that area through targeted marketing and talent attraction.

2. Ensure the process you're using is fair and where possible "blind" - review every step of your recruiting process to ensure equity in decision making and when possible systematic approaches/tools.  For example, consider deleting names and identifying data from resumes passed on to leaders.

3. Do not try to get rid of bias completely (it's impossible!), however, work to ensure your hiring employees are aware of it and are consciously working to be inclusive.  Help your HR team and hiring managers to understand their biases (which have likely been engrained in them since early life) and work to combat these through focused inclusion.  Ensure that hiring panels and decision making panels are diverse.