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Recruiting and retaining talented employees from diverse backgrounds is important for many reasons. Diverse teams are likely to outperform their competitors in terms of profitability. In addition, your organization can better cater to the diverse needs of consumers while improving workforce innovation.
Unfortunately, many organizations today struggle to fill their talent pool with talent from diverse backgrounds. This means they are unable to achieve their representation goals, nor experience the benefits of having a diverse and inclusive workforce.
If your organization is facing a pipeline problem when it comes to hiring more diverse talent, it is essential that you take corrective steps to resolve this problem. This article will discuss five areas to help you troubleshoot what may be causing the piping problem and strategies to mitigate it.
Related: Unconventional Ways to Recruit Diverse Talent
1. Barriers and goals
What is the representative goal for your organization? Perhaps your company may want to increase the percentage of female C-suite leaders by a certain percentage, or is looking for more talent from underrepresented backgrounds in senior management positions. The objective can be quantitative or qualitative. Whatever your vision is, the vision should be clear and have specific metrics associated with it.
Once the company’s purpose is clear, move on to the individual experience. Underrepresented talent faces various barriers in their careers. Determine what barriers exist for your target groups. This can manifest in ways such as lack of support from colleagues or lack of opportunities.
Consider how these individual barriers will affect their career trajectory. Identifying all the existing processes in the company can help mitigate these barriers in the short term.
Related: 4 criteria different talents use to evaluate their future employers
2. Review your talent acquisition strategies
What do your current talent acquisition strategies look like? If you’re looking at your existing talent pool, where are your talents coming from right now? Do you think this meets the representation goal you have at the organizational level? If you want to achieve a different result and increase representation in your organization, you may need to rethink your talent acquisition strategies.
If the company isn’t meeting its performance targets and is looking for more talent from underrepresented backgrounds, then you can’t do the same thing you were doing before. There has to be some change. Whether you’re revamping existing strategic jobs that are working very well or trying something completely different, you need to do something different. This is no exception when looking at your talent acquisition strategy.
So what does a sourcing strategy look like? It’s imperative to understand that you can’t expect a different result if you do the same thing you did before, so make sure your sourcing strategy reflects this change in some way.
Related: Struggling to Hire Right Now? It’s time to go all-in on diversity
3. Interpretation of evaluation criteria
How do you currently assess and evaluate applicants? You may already have a method in place for how you evaluate and rate applicants. But what if it prevents your underrepresented talents from even applying? While the criteria remain the same when it comes to skills or experience, the interpretation will have to change.
For example, when assessing cultural fit, many companies assess cultural fit based on shared personal interests. This can turn away talent coming from different backgrounds. So instead of such personal interests, focus on valuing shared professional values.
If you’re looking for different candidates, your criteria may need to change to evaluate candidates from different perspectives. For example, instead of assessing cultural fit by shared interests, consider assessing their professional values. Rather than focusing on specific differentiated schools or degrees, consider maintaining a specific educational level or equivalent amount of work experience in a specific business function.
By changing the interpretation of the evaluation criteria themselves, your recruiting team will be able to start evaluating different talents based on the additional strengths they can bring to the table, rather than how similar they are to everyone else. This in turn will help with the number of applications that make it through the initial rounds of recruitment stages.
Related: Hire Like a Diversity Expert: 5 Key Qualities of Inclusive Employees
4. Ratio between interview and offer
Are people of different backgrounds interviewed at all? If the answer is no, the first three areas in this blog may be helpful in troubleshooting the problem. However, if various candidates are interviewed but no offers are made, this may be a symptom of a deeper problem.
Consider recording the interviews for both training and transparency purposes. When you go back through the records, you’ll see things that stand out. Perhaps a candidate may have been asked a question, even as an icebreaker, that other candidates were not asked. It may have been a different situation or an applicant may not have been granted the accommodation they requested.
This will help you identify possibly why some of these talents didn’t even make it to the final offer stage and determine at a strategic level where the problem may be coming from.
Related: Diversity and Inclusion Best Practices for Your Workforce
5. Career trajectory
Maybe you have everything absolutely nailed down in terms of strategic direction, sourcing strategies, great interview-to-offer ratios, and candidates who accept the offer. However, retention or representation at executive levels may require more improvement. If this is the case, the career trajectory should be explored.
This is a long-term strategy where you will have to collect over the years to study the trend. For example, if entry-level employees leave the company for another company that has given them a higher-level role, it may mean that they did not see an opportunity for growth. Although if a senior team member comes in as a new leader and they leave, it may be that they didn’t feel ready for success.
Once you’ve identified a clear pattern, go further into the records. What concerns did they raise with their managers? Has anyone else run by this manager had a similar problem? Were there any indications? Use data to better shape your career trajectory and experience.
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