Hiring for Diversity and Inclusion in Today’s Tough IT Market

When hiring in today’s IT market and addressing concerns regarding Diversity and Inclusion (D&I), it is hard enough to have any qualified people apply and then be hired, onboarded, and retained much less also hire towards achieving our D&I goals. Adding to this difficulty is that the existing workforce and new graduates in many of the hardest-to-fill areas are often a less diverse pool than desired.

There are also well-meaning but often counterproductive HR Policies hiring managers must deal with as well. I know someone at a very large financial management company that was not allowed to extend an offer to a qualified applicant for a Data Scientist position (where the applicant was the ideal hire for the position and had a strong desire to work for the company) because the hiring manager had not interviewed at least two people that fit the D&I guidelines the HR Department established. Of course, the manager was never provided two people to interview that checked off all of the HR’s Department's D&I boxes but that didn’t seem to be relevant.

What are your options in these Catch-22 situations? Can you use consultants to fill the gap? Not likely in this market. Even the largest and most respected consulting firms cannot hire enough people and find that they must understaff, push out start dates, or turn down contracts because of hiring in this market. Even if you are willing to pay the rates of the top-tier consultancies, the biggest firms will not provide people for Staff Aug roles because the people they do have are allocated to their strategic multimillion-dollar, multi-year program engagements. The small boutique firms that will do Staff Aug also do not have people to place.

Solving this problem will require long-term strategic thinking and action on the part of recruiters and hiring managers, evaluating the way things have always been done, and changing how you do some recruiting. Let’s consider new graduates today; I’ll touch on increasing diversity for more experienced recruits in a future article. 

From where does your company recruit new hires?

Broaden the places where you recruit to programs that are more diverse by their nature and invest in current employees.

If your company recruits new grad hires disproportionately from elite schools, does this policy advance the D&I goals of your company and do these programs deliver the results for which your company started recruiting from elite schools in the first place? Have you measured the results?

I look for new graduate hires that I think have the right attitude and aptitude, will likely succeed over time, grow into new capabilities and responsibility, and are driven to succeed. I have hired long-term successful new hires from both Ivy League graduate programs and from two-year programs at local community colleges.

It is also effective to train and upskill existing high potential employees for new roles but we need to ensure that employees can use their benefits like tuition reimbursement with minimal hassle.  Companies need to recognize that for many people, getting together $1,500 or $2,500 for a class that will eventually be reimbursed is very difficult or impossible. Consider implementing programs that pay for all course costs upon registration (but still require completion and minimum grades to continue).

In the labor market that exists today, filling open positions is difficult enough much less adding the complexity of accommodating mandates for hiring to enrich the D&I of your staff. If you do nothing outside of what your company has always done, you might eventually fill your open positions and you might get a slightly more diverse applicant pool, but most likely you will not. Do most Directors or Managers at companies do anything outside the norm? No, they do not; shake it up and be a leader by trying something different and bold.

This will not solve the urgent problem that many of the open positions today require highly skilled and experienced engineers not new grad-level engineers. You will not solve this staffing problem today but can begin to solve this staffing problem today.