The Competitive Advantage of Diversity Recruiting

If there's one thing business has learned since the economic meltdown of 2008, it's this: In a tough market, the key to success is innovation. Businesses who do nothing but imitate competitors not only don't get ahead, but start falling further and further behind.

And guess what? Having a diverse workforce is no exception. For many companies, diversity recruiting programs have taken a back seat in the past couple of years. That's a mistake, and here's why:

1. Diversity innovators have a huge opportunity right now
In a sluggish employment market, companies that take the initiative in diversity recruiting have a better chance of standing out from the competition. Not only can they attract the best and brightest of a diverse talent pool, but they can reap other benefits, like an improved employment brand and better media opportunities.

In other words, a little bit of effort can go a long way in the current market.

2. The market may be slow, but it hasn't stopped
The talent pool may be a little less competitive than it was 3 or 4 years ago, but there are still all kinds of roles and industries which are suffering from chronic talent shortages. Diverse talent pools are still the best 'untapped' source of talent for many of these hard-to-fill roles. Ignoring diversity recruiting strategies now will increase your time-to-hire, cost-per-hire and quality of hire in the next 12 months.

3. You're letting your competitors gain the advantage
When your competitors are tapping into the full talent pool - including diverse candidates - they're giving themselves the best opportunity to get the A-list candidates before you do.

What's more, your competitors are setting themselves up for long-term success: When the market improves (and it always does), they'll already be well-established in the diversity talent market, while you're still playing catch-up.

Don't think of diversity recruiting as a 'mandate' that you have to adhere to. Think of it as an opportunity to get ahead of the competition - and set yourself up for success in the long term.

Your Recruitment Brand is Undermining Your Consumer Brand

Your sales and marketing department is working overtime to reach a diverse target market: They're creating advertising in different languages, making sure a wide variety of cultures and lifestyles are reflected in your marketing initiatives, and doing their best to make sure your consumer brand is appealing to a diverse community.

So how come your recruitment efforts aren't reflecting the same commitment to diversity?

These days, the average consumer is more sophisticated than ever. When they see that your company wants to sell them something, but doesn't want to hire them, they notice.

Consumers like to buy brands with which they have relationships. Relationships are created when consumers feel that a brand is speaking to or connecting with them as an individual - it's not unusual for consumers to say they like a brand because it "understands" them. That's why marketing departments work so hard to create communications which speak to different diverse populations.

When your recruitment brand continues to focus solely on the 'mainstream' market, it undermines your consumer brand - and both end up suffering as a result.

The best way to get the most out of your marketing and recruitment dollars? Synchronize your efforts. Schedule a meeting with your sales and marketing team, and put your heads together:

• What diverse populations are most crucial for your business right now?
  
• How can you leverage consumer and candidate data to reach both groups?
  
• What channels can you use to communicate to both customers and candidates?
  
• What messages are most important to different diversity groups?
  

Remember, the more consistent your brand across all target groups and media, the better - and more cost-effective - the results for both recruiting and marketing.

Recruiting for Diversity : What the best in the business are doing

We've all heard about the list of Canada's Best Diversity Employers award, but have you ever asked yourself what makes a company a great diversity recruiter?

Here's a look at some of the winners of the 2011 Best Diversity Employers award, and what they're doing to excel at recruiting diverse candidates.

At BC Hydro, more than 16% of employees are visible minorities. Even better, more than 18% of managers are visible minorities. So what's their secret? Not only do they have recruitment strategies designed to increase representation of diverse groups, but they monitor their progress on a monthly basis to ensure those strategies are working. They also have a team dedicated to recruitment and retention of Aboriginal employees.

Of Bombardier Aerospace's 12,000 Canadian employees, almost one-quarter are visible minorities. Their strategy has been to develop in-house, specialized training for all recruiters to ensure a bias- and racism-free sourcing and screening process.

Corus Entertainment isn't a huge company, but 9% of their employees, and 11% of their managers, are visible minorities. A key pillar of their recruitment strategy is to ensure that all job vacancies are forwarded to organizations which represent diverse job-seekers, including the Canadian National Institute for the Blind and the Aboriginal Human Resources Development Council.

Loblaw Companies Ltd. has almost 100,000 full- and part-time employees in Canada, and 15% of them are visible minorities (14% are managers). Individual stores are encouraged to be active within their communities, participating in diversity-themed events and career fairs. They've also recently opened a 'reflection room' in their head office to meet the spiritual and religious needs of their diverse employees.

At Xerox Canada, 15% of employees are visible minorities. One of the ways they've fostered the recruitment of diverse candidates is to invest in a large Diversity Inclusiveness section on their website - it does a great job of welcoming diverse candidates, and sets the stage for long-term retention as well.

You may not be in a position to set up a 'reflection room' as Loblaw has done, of course. But take a look at your corporate careers section. Do you have a 'diversity' page, or are you just relying on the old-fashioned tagline "Women and minorities are encouraged to apply" at the end of your job posts?

5 Ways to Combat Hidden Bias in Recruiting

You know you need to do a better job of recruiting diversity candidates, but you're still falling short of your goals. The problem may lie in 'hidden' biases that you're not even aware of. Here's how to combat them.

Don't post the job ad in English only. If your role requires a lot of interaction with a population whose first language isn't English, why not post the job ad (or parts of it) in that language as well as English? You'll attract more diverse candidates - and you may end up with someone who'll be more successful with your customers.

Go easy on jargon and region-specific slang terms in the job ad. Sentences like "Create value by leveraging stakeholder enthusiasm for productivity," are difficult for native English speakers to understand. They're even harder for people whose first language isn't English - and may keep them from applying.

Remove names from resumes before you screen them. Studies show that 'ethnic' names can affect how people perceive resumes. So have an intern remove the names from resumes before you do the screening process. That way you'll know you're judging them on skills, experience and presentation - not on any subconscious preconceptions.

Ensure your recruiting/hiring team is diverse. Diversity candidates tend to perform better when they're screened/interviewed by diversity employees, even if they aren't from the same background.

Make sure every candidate gets the same interview. As the statistics above demonstrate, diverse candidates are often given short shrift in the interview room. By having a formalized interview plan - in which everyone is asked the same questions, provided with the same information, and given the same amount of time, you increase the chances that a diverse candidate will perform well in the interview setting.

Graph above from the workexposed blog

Do your employees really know what holidays you're celebrating?

Now that all the stores are featuring huge displays of Hallowe'en candy, I was reminded of an office Hallowe'en party I went to a few years ago, which was a wakeup call about the need for more diversity awareness.

We were all standing around the boardroom eating various pumpkin-shaped Rice Krispie treats, cupcakes with orange and black frosting, and of course there was lots and lots of candy.

One of our newer employees, who'd recently moved to Canada from Mumbai, remarked that she "always" enjoyed these Hallowe'en parties, because she loved candy.

"But," I said, "you weren't here for last Hallowe'en, were you?"

"Well, you know - whatever that last one was where we also had candy."

It took me a second, but then I realized she was referring to an Easter egg hunt we'd had the previous April - which, of course, was also heavy on the sweet treats.

To me, this was a good example of how often we just don't think about diversity in the workplace. It had never occurred to me that to some of our new Canadians, all these celebrations - our office tended to bring out the candy on Valentine's Day, Thanksgiving and even St. Patrick's Day, as well as Hallowe'en and Easter - were a bit bewildering. Sure, most new Canadians, regardless of religion or culture, were aware of Christmas, but 'holidays' like Hallowe'en are often new (and probably meaningless) to them.

More importantly, it made me realize that we weren't doing a good job of celebrating their big days.

Celebrations like the Diwali (Hindu), for example, feature lots of sweetmeats - perfect for an office which likes to bring out the cupcakes and candy for other events!

So this year, when you find yourself putting the company plastic-pumpkin-filled-with-candy in the lobby, you may want to approach one of your new Canadian employees and ask them about their favourite cultural holiday - and then make plans to celebrate it, as well.

Political Correctness vs Reality

When it comes to actually creating a diverse workforce I have often talked about how it is as simple as making sure that you are looking at everyone. Meanwhile I have written here before about how sometimes that isn't really enough. In the previous context it's because sometimes you need quotas to break the non-diverse culture of an organization.

But I have become more aware of another reason to implement quotas. To actually attract diverse candidates.

Now this isn't applicable to all of our affinity groups, but for some at least the existence of quotas, either formally or informally, actually encourages applicants. To be blunt telling an affinity group that a specific job is going to be filled by someone from their group can, in some cases, make a huge difference in attracting candidates to the role.

On the face of it this flies in the face of my statement that you simply need to look at everyone but I'm not sure that it really does. At the end of the day you can't see all candidates if they are not visible to you and this is really about just making sure that those candidates are visible to you, or in other words making sure that candidates from the different groups are actually applying to your job.

But doesn't encouraging one group to apply in this way actually discourage other groups. Quite possibly yes but again I think that to effect change in the reality of your workforce and hiring cultures you sometimes have to break existing patterns even if it seems somewhat counter-intuitive. I think it helps to take a step back and examine why candidates would be more likely to apply to a job that is being held out for a certain quota.

There is an obvious answer that it seems like less competition. If I as a candidate feel that the number of candidates will be restricted artificially it means a better chance for me to land the job even if I am not the most qualified. This is a point that while cynical has some truth to it but there is a second answer that has more of an impact. For some affinity groups the experience is that even when they are more qualified then other candidates they will be passed over for opportunities. I have talked before about the ways, both passive and active in which this happens but the fact is that either way it does happen. Just because we don't want this experience to be true for diverse candidates doesn't mean that many don't actually have this experience.

In any case though it's a tricky subject to navigate. Do you make it clear that certain roles will only be filled by diverse candidates or do you just rely on your employment brand as a diverse employer to make the difference? We'd all like it to be just the second but again the reality is that for some affinity groups this simply isn't enough.

I don't have an answer to the above questions, although to be honest I don't think that anyone really does. I do think though that if your goal is a truly diverse workplace I'm not sure organizations have any choice but to implement policies, at least in the short-term, like quotas in order to demonstrate to candidates that they are truly committed to a fully inclusive workplace.

Employee Groups : Community Building or Ghettoizing

I had a discussion recently with some HR team members at a large financial institution who have Canadian operations but are mainly in the U.S. and the issues surrounding employee groups for affinity groups came up. If you're not clear what I mean by that many organizations sponsor, support or promote "diversity groups" of their employees. So for example you might have an "African-American" employee group, or an "Aboriginal Employee Support Group" or a "LGBT in the workplace group".

Now again these sorts of groups or employee organizations do exist on both sides of the border although they tend to be more popular south of the border. Why is that? Well for one thing, at least in Canada, there are mixed views on the subject.

The two main schools of thought on this are that either it's a great idea that fosters a sense of community spirit and belonging within a group of employees or it's a terrible idea that creates "ghettos" of employee cliques arranged along lines of ethnicity, skin colour or other groups.

While I can see how, to a certain extent, groups that are by definition exclusive do seem to detract from the goal of inclusion I think that seeing these groups in a very negative light is to miss the point. Employee engagement has become such a "hot" topic, especially in light of the economically uncertain times of late when there is plenty to distract employees, and yet engagement of diverse employees is for many simply an afterthought.

The disconnect that employees can feel from their place of employment is magnified very much for many diverse individuals because, on top of the regular issues, they can feel like "outsiders" at their place of work. In this line anything that an employer can do to make their employees feel more at home in the workplace is going to lead to higher engagement and better productivity.

And at heart that's what these groups are about. Building communities, even smaller ones that may be in some ways exclusionary is an important step in making employees feel at home in an organization.

It's interesting to note that the companies who really "get it", those that engage with all diverse employment groups and not those just covered by legislation, are far more likely to have these groups and tend to do more work to encourage their creation. It speaks I think both to the reality of these groups as a vital part of an effective diversity strategy and the bottom-line fact that diversity inclusion has a positive effect on the success vector of a business.

The idea of embracing diversity in an inclusive way is important, and we should not lose sight of that. But encouraging groups to celebrate their differences with each other isn't harmful to that cause, in fact, in the end it brings us much closer to that goal.