Are we really putting our most diverse foot forward when hiring talent?

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Are we really putting our most diverse foot forward when hiring talent?

Last week I attended the Tiara awards in London; these are recruitment awards celebrating those agencies who go above and beyond in different categories. While it may not be my idea of fun to sit in a room with 500 boozing recruiters, there definitely were some very interesting speeches.

One that stood out to me in particular was that of Amy Golding, CEO of Opus. Whilst celebrated for their DE&I efforts, she highlighted in her acceptance speech that ‘shortlists, are currently very short lists’ and as agency recruiters we can all do better.

I’ve been pondering over this for the past few days, she absolutely has a point. As an agency recruiter I always agree an SLA with my client to send a shortlist of the best and most suitable candidates after 2-3 days depending on the role. Yet, when competing with other agencies or working on a contingent search, the candidates on the shortlist are ‘my 3 best shots’. What I mean with that is that these are the best and the brightest in the market. What these aren’t are diverse hires with high potential.

Then what is diverse hiring? In the past I’ve made efforts to remove pictures, names and dates of births of candidates to eliminate any obvious hiring biases, prior to sending the CV. Yet this approach means that as a recruiter all I am doing is approaching the very few diverse candidates available. Is that really what DE&I is about?

Does DE&I mean headhunting the one diverse candidate in a niche market, or is it opening the talent pool to a wider audience of potentially suitable candidates?

If we do the former, then all we are doing in a candidate short market is moving professionals from left to right. We are doing nothing to advance DE&I awareness in the workplace but give ourselves a pad on the back because we moved someone from a minority from one company to another. We equally don't positively contribute to the war on talent and are not helping solve the conundrum of a candidate shortage in a market where unemployment is at an all-time low, and available jobs at a record high.

This CEO’s comment made me realise that my DE&I efforts are falling incredibly short to be called progress. As a DE&I advocate at SGI, I feel embarrassed and educated through this.

I brought this up during a client meeting on Thursday and agreed with the manager that we need to go back to the drawing board on a search. We do not need a shortlist of the 3 best white male mid thirties developers who all have a similar computer science degree from an esteemed local university and are currently working at a competitor. What we also do not need is 2 male candidates and 1 female for representation sake. What we must do is understand the essential key skills, the trajectory of the role and include this in the vacancy.

Back to the drawing board resulted in an adjusted job description and greatly enlarged candidate pool. The local university degree that was originally required, actually represents a level of coding needed to do the job well. That specific level of coding is not necessarily required in the first 6 months of starting the role and can be acquired on the job, but stands for a logical way of thinking that the target candidate requires to be successful in this role. We removed the university degree and replaced it by the requirement to demonstrate logical thinking in development tasks and when learning new code. With this simple change we removed a lot of bias, that was never intended in the first place.

A conversation like this can only take place when recruiter and hiring manager have a good relationship and trust each other. The recruiter needs to have the manager’s confidence that they will make a good assessment of the market and have faith that the 3 candidates put forward on the shortlist are those who show the best fit for the role long term. Not just those who tick every box because they got access to the right university when they were 18.

When an agency recruiter feels they are competing with 2-3 other agencies, this exercise is mood. The same can be said for when a recruiter and hiring manager do not have that relationship and trust. For more on that point, I can refer to my earlier article on how to select the right recruiter to work with for your vacancy.

We can all do better to ensure DE&I is not a tick box exercise. To not just invite diverse talent so we can ease our conscious and say to ourselves ‘well we tried to invite diverse talent but they just didn’t meet the requirements’, when in reality it are the requirements that are inherently biased. Not everyone has access to the same schools, some were working part-time jobs in supermarkets next to their studies to support their family rather than doing hackathons at age 19. That does not mean the hackathon enthusiast could not be the right candidate for you, they might be absolutely perfect for your team. It only means that when you only invite candidates who completed hackathons, you exclude an incredible amount of people who might have always dreamed of doing hackathons but weren't born into a life that allowed them to complete them in spare time they didn’t have.

As recruiters we all need to do better. We need to be matching people with careers rather than CV's with jobs.

Before the social media police let's hell rain lose on me: all of this does not imply that I don't believe in the right person for the right job, that university degrees are a bonus, or that niche expertise and extracurricular activities don't matter. Being a law graduate and a niche recruiter myself, I do believe all of these contribute to your success in life and your career. What I am saying is that they do contribute to who you professionally are, as they should. What they shouldn't be is an automatic ticket to skip the line, as a lot of other amazing talent might be queuing up for entry.