What are the best practices for hiring and retaining diverse talent in a competitive market?

Cognitive Diversity is perhaps the most critically important characteristic to build into your business. Cognitive Diversity is when you hire people who think differently to you. When you take this approach, you quickly find that all other descriptors of diversity fade away because they way people think has no link to ethnicity, gender, age or sexual orientation. First step is to understand how YOU think and process information. Next step, for any given role (marketing, R&D, finance etc) you should look for differing approaches to information processing amongst the candidates. You will be surprised how the strongest candidate on paper is not always the best hire when you are focussed on building a cognitively diverse team.

Reviewing and improving your hiring practices is the most important step in achieving the goal of hiring and retaining diverse talent in any market. In committing to hiring more diverse talent for your organization you're putting words to your goal. In taking the time to review and evaluate your current system while committing to making the needed improvements, you're putting those words into action. Putting your goals and values into action is, in my opinion, the best way to start hiring and retaining diverse talent because it's a showing of your commitment to the results and not just to the lip service.

Practical tips for hiring managers. 1) Take unconscious bias training. It really helps 2) Assemble a panel of interviewers (typically 3). They are made up of the hiring manager (you), a technical expert and an observer. The observer is there to ask the non technical questions and to observe the interviewers. Observer also captures different feedback on the candidates as they are not focussed on the technical content. 3) De-brief as a group within a few hours/days of the interviews. Record findings and comments and be as detailed as possible to ensure hard facts and impressions are recorded. 4) Step back and reflect (unless under time pressure to offer quickly).

An effective way to support this is to make sure there is time in the day for this for all employees. Otherwise it will begin to feel like extra work for employees who want to participate which drops the value immediately. Ensuring that your team is scheduled under capacity to allow for this and other initiatives like learning and development ensures that it becomes part of the work culture which enables the groups to thrive, genuinely connect and support each other.