Diversity Hiring - How could the RAF have got it right instead of so wrong?

The RAF has been in the news this month for making a mess of its hiring - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/aug/18/raf-is-unashamed-of-its-diversity-targets-says-head-of-recruitment?Perfectly sensibly it decided that it should try and fish in a bigger pond than just the traditionally self-electing white males.?After all the bigger the talent pool you fish in, the wider range and quality of talent you can access.?Which means that far from having to drop standards, you should be able to drive them up.?If that doesn’t happen, you’re doing it wrong.

The RAF set itself targets and then found it couldn’t hit them.?This is where it all went wrong.?Instead of filling their training courses with the qualified candidates it had found, reflecting on why it wasn’t getting enough diverse candidates and changing its approach; it decided to massage the diversity figures to hit the targets it had set itself.?So, it turned away qualified white male candidates and changed the quality criteria for diverse candidates.??Although it claimed otherwise, it potentially compromised the fighting strength and quality of the Service and left the diverse candidates who had met the criteria tarred with suspicion of inadequacy.?The result was that the head of recruitment at Cranwell (the RAF training centre) resigned in protest and the RAF got horrible publicity when it had to admit that it was slowing recruitment because it couldn’t hit its diversity targets.

So, what should they have done??The suggestion is that the targets were “impossible”, which suggests that they had not been set in relation to where the RAF was starting from and the size of the pool of potentially qualified diverse candidates who might be interested in the opportunity, if they were approached.?Rather they seem to have been set in isolation.?When the RAF didn’t meet them, they panicked.?What is clear is that it was felt more important to hit the diversity target than their overall recruitment target and quality threshold.?Afterall, if you need ‘em you need ‘em.?

When I started as CEO of Operis 3 years ago, I walked into the analytical team room, which contained what is thought to be the largest and finest group of financial analysts specialising in project finance in the world.?Although the Operis leadership team is very diverse both in terms of gender and ethnicity, I found hardly any women in the analytical team.?There were very few South Asians and no black colleagues.?The largest ethnic group across the London and Toronto offices was South-East Asian, with the UK, where that ethnicity is tiny; as big as in Canada, where it is sizeable.??Operis got c800 applications for about 6-8 places a year with minimal effort.?But I felt we were missing out on potential talent, and I do believe that diversity of thought is valuable and would be enhanced with a more diverse group of staff.?

We looked at where we were starting from:?12.5% of the team were female and we set a 5-year target of doubling that across both offices, knowing that we also wanted to grow the team overall by nearly 50%.?I thought we could do better, but was persuaded that this was an ambitious target.?For South Asian and Black ethnicity, we aimed to equal the percentage of the UK and Canadian population for those ethnicities.?Instead of sitting back and fielding applications, HR got busy.?We completely changed our careers’ pages, giving a much better sense of the jobs and the culture, and showing pictures of current staff.?This meant applicants could see if there was already someone at Operis who looked like them.?HR then went to get advice from other firms that were now doing very well in this type of recruitment and rewrote their ads to make them more appealing, particularly to female candidates.?They also highlighted that we were very interested in diverse candidates.?Finally, they hit the universities we have been historically successful with extra outreach - contacting student societies in them like Women in STEM etc.?They also got in touch with other universities with a strong reputation for quality diverse students.

At no point, did we consider reducing our quality criteria or hiring fewer people if the diverse candidate numbers proved slow to build.?With urgent growth ambitions, Operis needed the staff and, with a policy of training its own, it couldn’t solve its problem through lateral hires.?But, as I suspected, if you present yourself in the right way and you have great training and a great career to offer, and you go prospecting in the right places where your candidates are, then there is more than enough talent out there.?Operis increased the number of female and South Asian candidates very significantly.?But interestingly, the quality of that pool of new candidates was on average higher than the norm, so although it didn’t always get 25% of, e.g. female, candidates in a particular round, it ended up hiring a higher proportion of them, and so met and surpassed its targets in 3 years.?The only area that has proved challenging is getting black candidates to apply.?That is going to take more thought and effort.?

I am very proud of the Firm’s achievement in this area.?These candidates have been hugely successful on joining and existing staff have been enjoying their impact on the mix of colleagues. In addition, as we know, inclusion is as important as the hiring.?I have recently stepped down as CEO.?As I did so, we were told that we had made the list of Best Small Firms for Women in the Great Places to Work Scheme on our first application and the feedback from our ethnic minority colleagues in the overall survey was also excellent.?Operis is also part of the Treasury Women in Finance Scheme.

The RAF perhaps needs to go and talk to companies in the private sector that are doing well in this area and rethink their whole approach.?#diversity #women #projectfinance @RAF @Operis?#southasian #womeninfinance #black #recruitment #ethnic #STEM #womeninstem #analyst #blackinfinance