Durable Diversity

Maintain a Dependable Workforce of Complementary People

Is diversity important? Most organizational leaders answer with an immediate “yes.” Why do they believe this? Those answers vary. Some say diversity has improved their business results. Others mention that it allows them to better serve their diverse customer base. Still others state diversity in hiring is the right thing to do in our modern world.

Diversity has been part of my life since childhood. I was fortunate to attend public schools and a state university filled with a diverse body of students and teachers. Classes and teams and student groups had a mixture of people. Some were quite smart and talented, others modestly so. Neither had anything to do with race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or other dimensions of diversity. The achievements of my peers were based upon their efforts, not their backgrounds.

Let’s be clear: I wasn’t oblivious to prejudice as a kid and young adult. My friends shared their experiences about being “different.” They talked about being stared at suspiciously, receiving extra scrutiny from police, and family members being passed over for jobs. All because they looked or acted differently. These stories angered me then, and still do today.

That’s one of the reasons I was attracted to my first recruiting job. I’ve always believed that the most qualified person should get the job, regardless of their background. Which is why I was thrilled to serve on my first search committee in the late 1980s.

We were helping a college select a new director for their Career Planning and Placement office. In extending the invitation, the school stressed the importance of diversity. They’d reached out to a diverse pool of candidates. Administrators had whittled the list of contenders down to a handful of potential hires. Members of the search committee were to help make the final selection. This included a commitment that we’d choose the person who was the best fit for the role. I was excited. We were hiring for a department that helped other people find work. It seemed like a perfect match for my passion for supporting people in their careers.

To kick off our work, our committee met for a planning session. Leading the meeting was a vice president from the school. He thanked us for taking part and brought us up to speed on the status of the search. The college had reviewed fifty applicants for the director role. These applicants came from all parts of the country and were “a melting pot of diversity.” He and his colleagues had identified the four best candidates. Our job was to interview them one at a time, compare notes, and rank them in order of whom we thought should be first choice, second choice, and so forth. The process sounded reasonable.

The vice president ended the meeting with the following charge: “Just so you know, one of our final four is a minority candidate. If he’s qualified, rank him first. Any questions?” My first thought was: Did I hear that correctly? Did he tell us that being a minority was the most important of the criteria? I must have misunderstood. I raised my hand, and asked, “What if one of the other candidates is more qualified?” Narrowing his eyes, he glared at me. Then, he looked around the room, and responded, “Like I said, one of our final four is a minority candidate. If he’s qualified, he’s the one you should rank first. Any other questions?” There were none. The meeting was adjourned. Committee members grabbed their things and left the room quickly.

I was angry and embarrassed. Here I thought I would be taking part in something good. Something meaningful. Instead, I learned that the deck was already stacked in a way that seemed unfair. Plus, I was embarrassed by the vice president’s stern response to my question. Most of all, I was shocked at the contradiction. The college had stressed the importance of diversity and had required that we commit to picking the best person for the job, regardless of their background.

I was tempted to quit. After a long mental debate, I stuck with the job. I can’t say exactly why. It felt like something I had to do. I’m glad I did. We interviewed all four candidates, sharing our thoughts after each. Following the interviews, we did as we were asked: We ranked the candidates as our first choice, second choice, then third and fourth. Who’d we rank first? The minority candidate. Not because we were told to, but because he was the best person for the job.

No big deal, right? It all worked out in the end. Not exactly. The minority candidate accepted the job. Later, he learned what we’d been told—that he would have gotten the job if he were qualified, even if one of the other candidates was better qualified. He was appalled, nearly resigning his new post.

In the end, he stayed. He decided to use the circumstances of his hire and his director role to promote change. This included meeting one-on-one with each member of the search committee. It was a meeting I’ll never forget.

The director asked me about my experience serving on the search committee. I was honest, telling him everything—my passion for recruiting, the mixed messages from the college and vice president, and my anger over what seemed like an unfair process. He responded, “That’s good. I like that you’re angry. It’s appropriate to be angry about prejudicial hiring. Because that’s what this was. Prejudice in action. Race, gender, or other factors should never trump fitness for a job. That’s the problem with many diversity initiatives. People are put in jobs because they’re a minority, not because they’re the best fit. Some of them are put in roles for which they’re ill prepared. Their careers and the organizations where they work end up being hurt.”

At the end of our conversation, the director asked for a promise: “Promise me that you’ll do what you can to promote a fair and sustainable form of diversity.” It was a commitment I was happy to make.

Durable Diversity

Research backs up assertions that diversity has positive impacts. Companies with the most diverse workforces are more likely to generate better financial results.¹ In the United States, there’s a direct relationship between financial performance and the amount of ethnic and racial diversity of the executive team.² The more women on an executive team, the better the company’s results as well. Having 30 percent female executives generates up to six percentage points in additional profits.³

Does this mean that everyone is sold on the importance of a diverse workforce? No, they’re not. When asked if diversity matters in the workplace, some leaders answer “no” or “I’m not sure.” But not immediately. Initially, they’ll look around, making sure no one else is listening, even shutting their doors. Sometimes, they’ve demanded a pledge of anonymity. Why the caution? They’re afraid. They believe it’s politically incorrect, when it comes to diversity in the workplace, to offer anything but an affirmative response.

Are these leaders bigots? A handful are, but not all. The majority of those who’ve shared doubts with me about diversity want to hire people with diverse backgrounds. They also want their jobs filled and to remain filled. For them, individual differences don’t matter. What does is having enough qualified people to get work done.

For these leaders, diversity isn’t the problem. The issue is how their organizations go about maintaining a diverse workforce. Like the aforementioned director of Career Planning and Placement, these leaders don’t believe that skills and experience should take a back seat to diversity. They bristle when told to hire someone solely because of race. They take issue with meeting gender balance quotas. Religion, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, in their eyes, shouldn’t be factors used in the selection process.

Adding to their frustration is the use of selection methods, like blind hiring, as a way to improve diversity. Blind hiring techniques include masking names on resumes and conducting anonymous interviews using chat rooms and voice-masking technology. Instead of eliminating bias from the recruiting process, it’s making leaders biased toward the process itself. One of these leaders summed it up this way: “I wish my company would stop treating me like I’m a member of a hate group. I don’t care who the candidate is, where they go to church, or their socioeconomic status. Which box they check for ethnicity is irrelevant. So is the fact that they may identify with the letters in LGBTQ. None of that matters. I care about one thing . . . can they do the work?”

What these organizations lack is durable diversity. Durable diversity creates a dependable workforce of complementary people. Organizations that are durably diverse look at the whole person when hiring. Their leaders recognize that each individual is more than a title, skillset, or member of an ethnic group. They’re not colorblind or gender neutral. Just the opposite. They’re hyperaware that maintaining a diverse and dependable workforce requires being able to select from a robust flow of different types of people.

If you’ve done business with the world’s most admired companies, you’ve experienced the benefits of durable diversity. Drop into a Starbucks. Go to the Apple store. Visit a Disney theme park. Note the diversity of their people. We love these companies because of these people. The rich tapestry of their backgrounds, skills, and experiences supports them in creating superior products and services.

You might be thinking that your company is different—that your organization lacks the brand recognition or reputation to draw in such a highly qualified diverse workforce. Top organizations didn’t start out as household names. They became well known because they chose a well-rounded group of employees that did excellent work. Work that made their companies great.

The Talent Accelerator Process will help you achieve durable diversity. The first five steps of TAP allow you to enrich, harness, and sustain a dependable workforce of complementary people.

Step #1: Create Hire-Right Profiles

Hire-Right Profiles can be a catalyst for diversity. Does this mean you add gender, race, or other differentiators as Dealmakers? No. To do so would prejudice your hiring. Tapping into a wider, diverse candidate base often only requires recategorizing hiring criteria.

The simple act of adjusting one Dealmaker is how a mortgage bank got on the path to durable diversity. For years, the bank had a reputation for being “blindingly white.” The executive team knew of this reputation and made creating a diverse workforce a key strategic initiative. They read lots of books, passing on ideas they’d gleaned to the management team. Members of the HR staff were sent to conferences on diversity, with hopes they’d learn new ideas. Budgets were increased, expanding the headcount of corporate recruiters. Yet, the lack of diversity remained a painful issue. The search for a solution went on.

The bank eventually gave the Talent Accelerator Process a try. They followed the steps, in order, beginning with creating Hire-Right Profiles for their core roles. This had an immediate payoff. A manager noticed that a four-year degree in finance showed up as a Dealmaker for each role. He challenged this idea, asking his colleagues why this was a required attribute. Initially, there was lots of pushback. A finance degree had been an employment requirement for these core roles for years. He kept at it, asking if anyone had proof that this was absolutely necessary for someone to succeed at the bank. The room got quiet. No one could offer a shred of evidence that a finance degree should be a Dealmaker.

Having a bachelor’s degree in finance was recategorized as a Boost. Now, recruiters could reach out to people with all types of college degrees, including associate and bachelor’s degrees in any field of study. Changing this one Dealmaker created flexibility as they leveraged each of the talent streams. The floodgates of the local talent pool spilled open, delivering a deluge of diverse well-qualified candidates.

It’s normal to put everything but the kitchen sink in your Dealmakers. Having an overly restrictive list of Dealbreakers is common as well. One or more of your criteria in either quadrant could block the flow of diverse top talent.

Take some time to review each item in the top half of a Hire-Right Profile. Ideally, you’ll do this with your hiring team, making it a dialogue. Challenge any assumptions you hear. Push back if someone says, “But this is how it’s always been done.” Be willing to compromise by suggesting that you experiment with two different versions of the Hire-Right Profile during the next round of hiring.

Here are some questions to discuss as you consider each Dealmaker and Dealbreaker:

• Why is this Dealmaker/Dealbreaker important?

• What proof do we have that it’s necessary?

• Who have we promoted internally that didn’t match those criteria? Have they succeeded in that role? If so, what does this tell us about it being a requirement?

• What alternatives are there to those criteria? Which other types of degrees could suffice? How about on-the-job training? What about transferable skills?

Step #2: Improve Candidate Gravity

Increasing your pull on talent can broaden your access to a diverse candidate base. Job ads and posts on social media can target an expanded audience. An applicant tracking system can be mined for candidates who weren’t previously seen as a fit. You can request additional referrals, attend new networking events, and ask external talent scouts to broaden their search. You can also create talent. That’s what an IT company in India did to build a diverse workforce.

For years, the company had difficulty finding enough qualified people to fill all the jobs in their network operations center (NOC). The NOC operated 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Each work shift required hundreds of employees for things to run smoothly. Recruiting enough talent had always been a challenge. Changes in technology prompted frequent changes in their hiring profile. Many candidates lacked the new skills the company was seeking.

The managing director, who had primary responsibility over hiring, was a fan of candidate gravity. In particular, he liked the idea that talent could be manufactured. He saw this as a solution to his people shortage, and it would allow him to create greater diversity in the NOC.

Across the globe, diversity means different things. In India, diversity runs wide and deep. The country has 22 official languages, plus hundreds of dialects. There are several major religions, thousands of tribes, and a system of castes and subcastes. These differences have polarized people into groups who have little in common, and even less contact with one another. The NOC’s managing director saw this as an opportunity, not an obstacle. The rich diversity of his country meant there were lots of pools of untapped talent.

Hire-Right Profiles were pared down to essential skills and then shared companywide. The company had offices throughout the country. These offices employed a vast cross-section of Indian society. Employees were asked to tap into their unique communities to uncover prospective talent. Candidates who had essential skills were interviewed, and hired if they were a good fit. As new employees, they were taught the new skills needed in their jobs.

This initiative was successful for several reasons. The company tapped into often overlooked candidates that could fill jobs and improve the diversity of the workforce. New hires became loyal employees, grateful that the company was willing to expand their work experience. Plus, internal employees in non-IT roles began applying for jobs at the NOC. The pared-down Hire-Right Profiles opened the door for these workers to transfer between departments.

Manufacturing a diverse group of workers for your company starts with your hiring profile. When you reevaluate which skills are essential versus teachable, you expand the possibilities for who may be a fit. Prospective candidates, internal or external, can then be hired for an open role and “skilled” into becoming productive employees. How you do that depends on the individual:

• Upskill: A worker with the basic aptitude for a role, but lacking specific skills, can be upskilled. For instance, let’s say you’re looking for a head chef for a restaurant. You’ve tried tapping into a diverse pool of talent, but many people lack experience in managing the business side of a kitchen. So, you focus your search on people with excellent culinary skills. Once hired, you upskill your new chef by sending him or her to some business classes.

• Reskill: A candidate could have a solid work history, but it’s in a different industry. Reskilling could turn that individual into a great employee. John retired after 30 years of working for a county agency, pushing lots of paper in an administrative role. Yet, he was good with his hands, tinkering with projects around the house. A plumbing company saw potential and helped John reskill so he could do a different job than he was used to.

Step #3: Maximize Hiring Styles

Selecting employees is easier when you have a hiring team. Your combined perceptions will counter hiring blindness. The team can also keep bias in check. That was the case for Team TalentSeeker. Their unified approach to hiring helped them build a diverse accounting department.

The four people comprising Team TalentSeeker took their responsibilities seriously. Thus the name they bestowed upon themselves. They spent every workday managing financial matters for their corporate office, and only wanted the best people around them.

One round of interviews forever changed their perspectives on diversity. Prior to these interviews, every member of the team believed themselves unbiased: That they made their hiring choices based upon someone’s ability to do a job, not because of gender, race, or other diversity dimension.

In discussing the four candidates they’d interviewed, three members of the hiring team thought one candidate, in particular, was the best one. She perfectly matched the top half of the Hire-Right Profile. Plus, they’d checked off several Boosts, including that she spoke three different languages.

The fourth member of the group, Bart, wasn’t sold. His teammates asked questions, trying to understand his concerns. He tried to articulate his reasons but struggled to explain himself. This went on for 20 minutes. Out of frustration, one of the team members in favor of hiring the candidate said, “She’s different from everyone else we’ve hired. Might your concern be her race? Maybe her gender?”

The room got quiet. No one had ever challenged another team member in this way. Then Bart said, “Initially, I was going to tell you that wasn’t the case. In fact, had I responded immediately, I would’ve shouted that gender and race have nothing to do with it. Your question made me that angry. However, as I thought about it, I realized I wasn’t angry with you. I was mad at myself after I recognized that race and gender are exactly why I’m hesitant to hire her.”

Bart’s admission began an intimate conversation about the nature of bias. “I was thinking how different she is from the rest of the team,” said Bart. “Wondering how she’d fit in. Worrying that hiring her may not work out because of racial differences. I wasn’t intending to act in a biased way. But that’s exactly what I was doing.” Bart’s honesty invited others to openly share. Each team member gave examples of how they’d behaved prejudicially in the past, much of it unintentional. Right then and there, they made a commitment to watch closely for bias.

Bias can be cunning. Like Bart, we can have the best intentions, but those intentions end up unintentionally prejudicing our decisions. Your hiring team can help avert this when you do two things:

1. Stay connected: The members of Team TalentSeeker trusted one another. That trust was built and nurtured through the strong connection they maintained. Staying connected with your hiring team builds rapport, making it easier to spot and communicate behaviors that could be rooted in bias.

2. Stay honest: Make a pact to be honest with your teammates about any form of bias. Discuss how to best communicate this if it shows up. Then, point bias out when you see it. Just remember to say what you mean without saying it mean.

Step #4: Conduct Experiential Interviews

Seeing someone do quality work makes it easier to judge the work instead of the person. That’s why hands-on interviews are a powerful tool in combating prejudicial hiring.

I discovered the extent of this power when faced with a challenging client—one that I considered “firing.” Their manufacturing plant was one of the most discriminatory environments I’d ever experienced.

Witnessing blatant discrimination was nothing new. Some prospective customers of my recruiting services voiced gender and racial preferences in job candidates. I’d firmly state that I didn’t work that way, and we’d go our separate ways. As an executive, I had to counsel managers on potentially discriminatory employment practices. In consulting, I’ve had to point out illegal hiring methods, ending relationships when organizations refused to clean up their act. Which is why I considered ending my consulting engagement with that manufacturer. I doubted they’d change their ways.

What was the problem? Hiring bias was the rule, not the exception. The plant operated in a caste-like system. Preferences for several ethnicities were openly stated for assembly line workers. These ethnicities were supposedly hard workers. Supervisors were next in the hierarchy, chosen from one particular race. Jobs in management were filled exclusively with men. Discrimination was rampant, infusing itself into the company’s DNA. Changing this appeared daunting, maybe even impossible.

However, I saw things through. Why? Because of one person—the production manager. He’d joined the manufacturer earlier that year, coming from another plant in town. There, he’d had a diverse workforce and knew the benefits of hiring all types of people. He’d accepted this new job knowing he’d have his work cut out for him.

His belief in the people he worked with is what convinced me to stay. “They’re not bad people,” he said. “They’re good folks who’re making poor choices. We used the Talent Accelerator Process at my last employer. I know we can use it to help them stop our prejudicial hiring practices.”

In particular, he saw experiential interviews as his primary instrument for changing perspectives. “It’s easy to judge a book by its cover,” he said. “When you look further, you often find out your first reaction was incorrect. That’s why hands-on interviews will make us successful. Hiring managers will see that their preconceived notions have been dead wrong.”

Experiential interviews were initially rolled out in one department. The production manager made sure a diverse group of qualified candidates were considered during hands-on interviews. Hiring managers got to experience these candidates doing sample work. Then, they discussed whom they thought they should hire.

Not surprisingly, managers leaned toward “the usual suspects”—the candidates whose ethnicity fit the rest of the department. We’d anticipated this. The production manager knew exactly what to say. “You know what,” he said, “having watched these candidates in action during their interviews, that was my first thought as well. And why wouldn’t it be? We’re used to hiring people who look and act like the rest of our staff. But when I compare the sample work done by each, some of the other candidates appear to be a better fit.”

The hiring team discussed this idea—that it’s normal to gravitate to what’s familiar. All agreed this happened often in their lives, and that this may have influenced their initial reactions about the candidates. The further they looked, the clearer it became that this was true. Comparing how candidates performed in the hands-on interviews to the Hire-Right Profile sealed the deal. Only one of their new hires matched the dominant ethnicity of the department. The remainder came from a mixture of backgrounds. All were chosen because they were the best fit.

The production manager went on to incorporate experiential interviews throughout the plant. Over time, the manufacturer became more diverse. It didn’t happen overnight. Some areas were slower to adapt than others. However, diversity, not discrimination, became the standard. Jobs were filled quickly, because they were tapping into a wider and deeper pool of talent.

Our thinking can be tricky. Without realizing it, our persistent thoughts can become deep ruts. These ruts narrow our perspective of how we view the world. That’s why our first thought about something can seem like a conditioned response. We’re stuck in that rut, that mindset. That’s what happened at the manufacturer. They were stuck in their persistent way of thinking about who would fit and who would not.

Does this behavior excuse bias? No, of course not. But it does explain it, and shows us what we need to do differently. We’re not responsible for our first thought, but we are responsible for our next action. That’s how the manufacturer started building a diverse workforce. They didn’t just go with their first thoughts about candidates. They challenged that mindset, looking at how people performed the tasks they were given in hands-on interviews. After a while, they found that their thinking started to change, and those old prejudicial ruts disappeared.

Experiential interviewing is a powerful tool in combating discrimination—much better than blind hiring. Blind hiring doesn’t address why bias happens. Experiential interviewing does. It helps organizations hire fairly, while also impacting how hiring managers think and act.

Step #5: Maintain a Talent Inventory

Earlier in the book, I shared that readily accessible inventories of talent provide shared benefits—the inventory advantage. Candidates get to line up better jobs. You have people ready to hire, when they’re needed. You might expect that the first four steps of the Talent Accelerator Process are the most important for sustaining durable diversity. That’s true, as long as you stay in regular contact with prospective hires in your Talent Inventory. The benefits of your Talent Inventory can also be shared with colleagues both inside and outside of your organization to help them maintain a diverse workforce.

A good example of helping internal colleagues occurred at a telecom company. Several locations were more successful than others at building inventories of diverse talent. A senior executive noticed this and laid out a mandate that locations start sharing their Talent Inventories. How was this received? Initially, not well. Leaders at locations with large inventories of talent took offense. They’d worked hard to build pools of prospective employees. Also, not everyone in an inventory would be willing to consider a job in a different location.

How’d the telecom company work out these issues? They helped all parties get their needs met. Money played a big part. Signing bonuses were offered to candidates if they moved to a different city. Company locations were financially compensated when candidates from their inventory were hired by another office. Did this make everyone happy? It did. Candidates were accepting offers. Locations supplying that talent received much needed budget dollars.

The same idea works between different organizations. Even competitors. You may find this surprising. Why would competitors want to share their most important asset—talent? It’s simple. It starts with mindset.

Competition is healthy. It’s a sign that an industry is viable, creating enough business opportunities for everyone. Competitors who view the world in this manner and also believe in the importance of diversity are frequently open to talent-sharing agreements. These agreements vary. This could include compensating another organization when you hire from their inventory. It also could include “borrowing” talent, keeping individuals working until needed by the organization that originally found them.

You get to choose how you leverage the advantages gained by your Talent Inventory. Maintaining a diverse pool of people gives you lots of options, including the option to share talent with others.

Healing Divisiveness

In newspapers and on TV, the world appears divisive: More than I’ve ever experienced in my lifetime. Politicians point out that the opposing party is out to get us. Specific countries are viewed as a threat to global security. Race continues to play a role in confrontations between citizens and police. Sexual harassment in the workplace and in schools seems rampant. It’s easy to feel powerless over these problems.

Can we do something to heal this divisiveness? We can, by exerting the power we do have. One of those powers is hiring. Improving diversity in hiring won’t cure divisiveness, but it can put a healthy dent in it. Why? Because of the importance of work. We spend a large chunk of each week at our jobs. Those hours impact how we think and the ways in which we act. We carry that home with us, impacting our family, friends, and communities.

This is one of the beautiful things about diversity in the workplace—its impact on society. I’ve seen countless examples of how a diverse workforce can influence positive change beyond the workplace.

One example, in particular, stands out. A pair of workers from a diverse organization lived in the same neighborhood, a neighborhood rife with crime. Neighbors blamed one another, focusing on racial differences and believing that these differences were the root cause of the crime problems.

The workers from the diverse organization stepped up, using communication and collaboration skills they’d acquired working with colleagues. They used these skills to tear down baseless accusations and build trust. They also helped create a neighborhood watch program to actively monitor activities.

In a short time, crime decreased dramatically. Just as important, new friendships were formed that, a few months before, would have seemed impossible. Neighbors still credit the pair of workers for being the catalyst for this change.