Diversifying Your Talent Pipeline? 4 x Things You Can Do Today w/Jerome Ternynck
In Ep42 of Brainfood Live we were lucky to have recruiting pioneer and SmartRecruiters CEO, Jerome Ternynck as our guest for the show.
Our focus for the live show was 'Social Good for Hiring Success', underpinned with the key question ‘What can recruiters do to diversify talent?’
Jerome’s early career path in the former communist Czechoslovakia forced him to think differently about recruitment. When the communist state collapsed and the economy immediately transitioned from controlled to free market, the local population had no previous experience of job roles common in a market economy. Jerome and his company had to look for raw talent and recruit for potential rather than those who looked good on paper. This was the start of Jerome's journey to an understanding the recruiters had a unique role to play in opening the door to economic opportunity for the marginalised groups in society whilst at the same moment helping companies succeed by diversifying their talent pools
We've distilled Jerome's thoughts into four core ideas that can help employers create modern, diverse thinking and agile operating businesses.
1. Recruit for Potential NOT Experience
Recruiters need to help companies shift focus on ‘must haves’ to ‘must achieves’. Instead of looking back into candidate history - which in the case of post-communist Czechoslavkia meant reviewing candidate experience which did not directly map to market economy job roles - it was the role of the recruiter to teach employers to look forward to future potential and project which candidates attributes might project onto future job functions.
Jerome found this simple change in focus expands the candidate pool and instantly diversifies it in terms of the previous occupational backgrounds of the candidates in pipeline, often with second order effect of increasing diversity in other measures (ethnicity, economic background, educational history)
2. Source from Different Places
Recruiters sometimes have too much of a singular focus on a favourite channel - for instance, LinkedIn - and as a result only find and engage candidates who are active on this channel. And yet no single source site for candidates captures the total addressable candidate market. We know that LinkedIn's active candidate population skews toward university educated, white collar workers. We also know that certain segments of our societies are under represented at those university educational level and in white collar work. Hence, active diversification from a singular sources of candidate data is a necessarily step for diversification of the talent pool.
3. De-bias Assessment
We have to accept that humans are bias. This is a natural part of how our brains have evolved to efficiently analyse events and quickly make decisions. This is a challenge for diversity, so if that is our objective we need to take active measures to do this. A recruiter has key influence here as we design the assessment process and the business should take our lead on it. Many things to do: ensure more than 1 x HM involved at interview, ask HM to quantify their candidate reviews, support HM in interview training, have objective standards for hire / no hire decision making. A key part of the value on a modern recruiter is the ability to influence the business towards a de-bias assessment process
4. Engineering 'Black Swan' Events
Nassim Nicholas Taleb popularised the term 'Black Swan' to describe unusual and unprecedented events which can have disproportional impact on the ecosystem. It is Jerome's advice that recruiters who want to diversify their talent pools can also engineer black swan events in order to radically inject diversity into the candidate pipeline.
A great example of this idea is Smart Recruiters’ upcoming event Hiring Success 2020 – where important elements of the programme are dedicated to those who face disproportionate disadvantage in the job market and would fail to advance in any traditional hiring funnel. For example, at Hiring Success 2020, expect tracks which include 'Second Chance' - programmes for the formerly incarcerated to meet with recruiters who jobs to fill and 'Reverse Recruiting' - a social responsibility campaign where recruiters worldwide donate time to helping candidates with job discovery, rather than helping companies fill jobs.
It was an inspirational session on Brainfood Live and our panel could have easily talked for longer about hiring for good. If you missed the full live show – you can watch again here.
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Hung Lee is the curator of Recruiting Brainfood, the weekly newsletter for the recruiting industry. Trusted by 19,000+ recruiters & HR professionals worldwide. Make sure to sign up to award winning newsletter here and register for the next Brainfood Live on Friday 24th January 3PM GMT / 9AM CST: Messaging Software Developers. A How to with Erin Mathew supported by recruiters from Elastic Search, managers from Stack Overflow and developers from Monzo.
Show notes produced in association with Green Umbrella Marketing.
Co-Founder & CEO @ Diversifying.io
4 年This was a great show and I loved Jerome's positioning of Recruiters being the "gatekeepers of economic opportunity" - how true. There's some great tips in the comments here and I'm with Nigel Dias?on the opportunity of doing more at the "attraction" stages.? As I delve deeper into looking at this challenge I am seeing more and more the complex process of candidate 'self-disqualification' before they even enter the process.? This could be the wording of an advert, lack of diversity on careers pages or even the feeling of imposter syndrome from the candidate in not feeling good enough for the role, even if they are good enough. For anyone wanting some step-by-step tips, I recently read "The Better Allies: Approach to Hiring" which is a good and easy to implement guide for a more inclusive hiring process. https://karencatlin.com/writings/
Head of People
4 年Winnie Welbergen
Chief People & Sustainability Officer @Viridium | Forbes HR Council | Co-Founder EMPATHY | Chief Enablement Officer | Executive Coach | Culture Curator | #HR & People Lover
4 年Have your job specs x-read by various people with varying background and focus, ensure it’s inviting to all types of candidates. Give opportunity to 2nd chance pools, Uni drop outs, unemployed, veterans.. the upskilling required will be paid back multifold with loyalty and commitment. Have mixed interview panels as to culture, business area, seniority. Every opinion matters. Get rid of ‘to do’s’, talk desired results. I always ask: ‘What can I learn from you?’ Stretch what you/your org is capable of, enrich your culture, add competencies, otherwise why hire?!
HR & People Analytics / People Transformations / Strategic Workforce Planning
4 年Some evidence to back up many of your points, based on typical findings in recruitment analytics projects:? - Diversity imbalances seem to begin in the attraction phases which undermines the rest of the pipeline, so if organisations don't invest in appropriate attraction activities they unfairly undermine their recruitment process.? - There are many types of bias that need to be addressed, from biases in writing a job spec to the words used in the spec to the way the recruiter judges what is merit. Structural/process support is probably required to address all these biases rather than pressure the recruitment person (anecdotal). - Also diversity imbalance in inevitable so it is useful to have targets for the level of imbalance over time.