Roads less traveled to inclusion

Inclusive hiring is a road we travel, with each fork a choice to be made. Often times we choose paths based on what I refer to as the familiar. Not long ago I was asked to help a team improve diversity outcomes, to help it make more diverse hires. By chance I was re-reading a favorite, Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken and framed a strategy upon Frost's powerful notion of a "less travelled" road making "all the difference." This engaged stakeholders to think of inclusion as choices. As a team, we agreed more inclusive hiring meant examining recruiting choices - that we only arrive at final hiring 'crossroads' after all our prior choices. Then we could set out to answer our question.

How can we make inclusive hiring choices?

Hire well and you reap rewards (better problem-solving, more innovation and higher customer satisfaction). Hire poorly and costs add up quickly (lurking alongside cost to replace poor hires are team dysfunction, more turnover, less innovation, lost revenue and deteriorating reputation). Before we dive into inclusive choices, let's look at how we make hiring choices first.

It sounds simple enough - attract applicants, screen to get a 'short-list' of candidates, then select the 'best' candidate. But we know it is anything but simple. Hiring mechanisms (parts and processes taken together to produce an outcome) are complex. Stakeholders (the choosers) are influenced in hiring choices by the familiar. In pursuit of better hires, the familiar is heard in the most frequently asked questions: "What are other companies doing?"; "What sources get better 'quality' of hire?"; "Referrals are great, how can we get more?" The familiar nudges us toward well-worn paths in hope of good results.

How we can avoid detours on the road to inclusive hiring, to think and choose differently? We can look for possible answers in our recruiting road's forks, each process stage: Branding, Sourcing, Selecting and Retaining .

Branding - think and act inclusively.

Vet your brand. Seek input from all stakeholders, encourage them to think as consumers of your brand. Take a close look at the images and words in your employer branding campaigns. When selecting image content, think what those images might convey to the talent community. Trying to see what others see is more helpful than stopping at what you see alone (if you choose just your own perspective, your road is paved with the familiar). Pictures may be worth a thousand words, but each word conjures hundreds of pictures. I still see job descriptions with gender-leaning pronouns that alienate others. Take a different road, have people of differing backgrounds, genders, ages and experiences read, react and help edit your content.

Here's a real example. A team designing a branding campaign met with me to review proposed content for social media. Two decks of pictures were on the table.

The first deck included happy people with clear skin and big smiles. It seemed great. However, I noticed a missing demographic. I asked the presenter 'These are great but it looks like everyone is similar in age range. Are there more images to see?' The reply was telling, "Well, we want to show energy and new ideas...." We discussed new ideas and 'high-energy' coming from a wider age range and we read feedback from an employee group with terms like "fun, cool, college" and "young." Then we updated the deck to include images of current employees with a wider array of experience levels. Feedback for the updated deck included "fun, energetic, collaboration" and wait for it ... "learning." The new deck had the desired impact but feedback showed it was more inclusive.

The second deck proposed an 'actual employees' montage where a team self-selected six 'headshots' and two team photos with fun moments of guys from the team. That's right - guys, all he/him/his and no other genders. [This group's job descriptions used mostly 'he/him/his' pronouns too... another project to tackle simultaneously.] Our employee review team noticed this right away and suggested adding more photos from across the whole team (those willing to have their photos used) and paring down some repeated photos. To make it less personal, we had a group from outside the team recommend images to include. The revised deck of eight headshots and four team pictures had better gender representation. Did it help? The campaign attracted an array of diverse talent. An added success came when several team members cited this team project later in their answers to an engagement survey question: "In the past year was there a time you felt more included? If so, when?" [In my opinion, a gem of an engagement survey question.]

With some nudges away from familiar age and gender roads toward more inclusive thinking, these projects produced more inclusive branding.

Sourcing - search and communicate inclusively.

Dive deep into channels. Talent comes to us from a few major channels - referrals, applicants and 'passive talent. Each of these has rewards and risks for inclusive hiring.

Referrals (people that employees know, like and want to work with) benefit from existing, familiar relationships but risk too much similarity that might lead to groupthink and less innovation. (There are several resources to check into, here's one.)

Applicants (people responding to job postings) benefit inclusion as they may come from many walks of life, but bias in selection processes pose a risk of reduced inclusion. Applicants might also be less diverse if branding is not as inclusive as possible.

Passive (people who were not looking but were 'activated' by external or in-house recruiters) and are now interested in joining your team (hence - 'active'). Passive candidates are often assumed to be better because they had to be activated by "Recruiters" (with or without that formal job title). The risk is that Recruiters are influenced toward the familiar by their biases and pressures and/or incentives to produce numbers.

[By the way, Talent sees bias for the familiar too. Bias in selection is measurable, as studies on resume 'whitening' reveal. ]

We can mitigate issues by measuring diverse representation at each recruiting process stage to help identify areas for focus, but to help improve Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Sourcing, try a Five-Why approach to find root causes and explore less-traveled roads. (Five-Why is an iterative, interrogative technique to explore and identify root causes. Each answer to 'Why?' forms the basis of the next question. And why five... anecdotal observation shows root-causes emerge at or around five, if you need/want more, have at it. There are no rules on 'how to' but try to engage those doing the work, and be persistent. Here's an example of a five-why review of Sourcing channels.

• The first why - "Why are we hiring a low number of diverse people?" - gets this reply: "We're making offers to finalists that match our skills. The hiring teams feel good about the choices they are given."
• The second why - "Why do they feel good about these channels?"- gets this response: "We get a good number of applicants, they're cheap and we get familiar profiles fast. It will cost more money and time to use other channels."
• Which takes us to the third why - "Why do you think they cost more and will take longer?" - gets us - "We need to explore new channels, their cost and possible ROI. It hasn't been done yet."
• Now on to the fourth why - "Why hasn't that been done yet?" - gets us this answer: "No time. We need candidates quickly and there's not enough time to explore new channels."
• Now we arrive at the fifth why, with "not enough time" a perceived root-cause of suboptimal diversity sourcing. We can focus on enabling new channels to boost inclusive talent in-flows, as opposed to other possible issues. Five why methods are not just for sourcing, they can help find root causes and engage stakeholders anywhere.

Selecting - remember that hiring is a team sport.

Asked why diversity itself is important, an entertainment industry leader said ... "I lead a television entertainment operation. We make TV shows with global appeal. Shows that viewers will like - I mean want to watch. If I made shows that only I liked, then we'd never grow. And I have no idea what lots of people will like, I have to have teams of people to figure that out. Teams of people with differing opinions and backgrounds that can create or pick winning ideas - ones that appeal to broad audiences."

That leader connects business success to teamwork to inclusion. A small team (or a team of one) is less capable of making successful products than diverse, more inclusive teams.

Here are some pro-tips to build more inclusive selection.

First - don't go it alone. Even if you are a founder making your first hire, get some help interviewing. Find people with different points of view - different ages, genders, religious beliefs, economic status, skills and specialties, whatever - to help assess candidates with you. Build diverse interview panels and in the end, you'll win talent more inclusively.

Second - use performance as measure. If a selection is made by something not measured in the work, then it is most likely important only to you. Writing software in a given code language? Measure candidates' abilities in that or related languages. I have seen coding interviews where coding was never discussed, focusing instead on preferred work schedules. While interviewers sought "fit" via similar work styles (early birds or night owls) they risk excluding skilled coders with different scheduling preferences that were "not a fit."

Third - carry selection criteria into on-boarding. Successful candidates rarely get top scores in every selection criteria. Winning talent often rates well in 3 or 4 of 5. Knowing this, imagine forming a new hire's on-boarding and development plan using the same or similar categories. A new hire that is highly regarded in four criteria should excel in those areas, while their lesser-rated area(s) are opportunities to improve. When the investment in strength building is as apparent as the investment to account for needs, you open doors for a wider array of people with a wider array of strengths and abilities. The investment will pay off. Hold Managers, peers and stakeholders accountable for building new hires' on-boarding plans on selection feedback. This creates paths to retaining more inclusively.

Retaining - bridge selecting to on-boarding to growth.

How do these help with inclusive retention? While diverse interview panels enable inclusive decisions, performance-based selection opens door by NOT closing them with familiar feelings of 'fit' or 'not-a-fit.' Tying on-boarding plans to performance-based selection criteria enables team members' integration and promotes a sense of belonging. Make the act of taking less-traveled, less familiar roads the norm rather than the exception. This connects each road chosen, from branding to sourcing to selection and on to Retention.

Making the difference

Our tendency to pursue the familiar leads us in directions we think will get us different (read better) results. Well, it has not worked well enough so far. There is truth in the adage that insanity is 'doing the same thing over and over and getting the same result, but expecting a different one.' To make a difference - to be more inclusive - choose roads less traveled.