Inclusion and diversity aren't about compliance or keeping up with marketing trends, they're about understanding the importance of sense-making, idea generation and energy towards change. (Photo: Shutterstock)
Movements such as Black Lives Matter highlight how diverse our world is and how important that diversity is to people, businesses and society. However, it is not enough to be aware of differences. People also have the desire to have those differences accepted and valued.
An organization's progress on the inclusion and diversity journey can be seen by the extent to which an organization can both promote the growth of differences in the culture and also accept and value those differences. This journey can pay dividends. A McKinsey report found that companies in the top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity are 35% more likely to have financial returns above their respective national industry medians.
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HR plays an important role in this journey, and it starts with the hiring process. By ensuring a fair hiring process, HR can help organizations be diverse and also capture a strategic advantage by expanding the talent pool and the potential for innovation. This journey begins with a few simple steps.
Step 1: Use data in the hiring process
Typical subjective hiring practices can introduce conscious or unconscious bias from recruiters and hiring managers. There is a natural tendency for individuals to prefer people who are more like themselves. Business Insider reported that "…when we don't have a rigorous, replicable set of criteria from which to evaluate a potential hire's merit, we fall back on our most immediate instrument: ourselves." By using a data-based hiring model that is demonstrably free of bias, organizations improve the fairness of their hiring processes and thereby improve diversity over time.
As Artificial Intelligence and advanced analytics transforms the economy, it can also transform the hiring process. If done right, it can promote more fair and accurate hiring decisions. If done wrong, it can reinforce biases and create a digital divide. Consider adopting hiring technology that is grounded in objective data and specifically designed to be predictive and fair regardless of age, race, or gender.
When adopting new hiring technologies, it's also important to form trusting partnerships with technology and hiring experts, such as Industrial Organizational psychologists, who are grounded in job analysis and understand how to legally, fairly and accurately improve the process for selecting and onboarding new talent. Data should be gathered and analyzed through a validation process to ensure that hiring tools meet acceptable guidelines and drive fair and predictive hiring decisions, regardless of age, race or gender. By starting the selection process with an objective filter, subjective bias is reduced from the beginning.
Step 2: Ensure bias-free interviewing
Once individuals become subjectively involved in sorting candidates, data and technology can also be used to generate bias-free interview questions that are linked to the science-driven behavioral insights that are both individually relevant and anchored in the fundamentals of the job. Technology can dynamically generate questions to explore disconnects between the person and the job requirements and give instructions on how to dig into opportunities in a fair and legally defensible fashion. The ideal tool will provide behaviorally anchored scoring guides, to further reduce subjective bias.
Furthermore, micro-trainings and intelligent pop-ups in the hiring and interviewing system can reinforce organizational values and the importance of unbiased interviewing. Raising hiring managers' awareness of the importance of diversity and inclusive management practices can pay dividends beyond the hiring process to also promote inclusive onboarding and performance management, thereby promoting the retention of a more inclusive workforce.
To the extent that interviewing is automated, systems must be in place to monitor the impact of such automation. Removing human judgment can remove human bias but it can also remove human oversight and allow automated bias to run rampant. Audits of the impact of interviewing automations are valuable. It's also advisable to document how automation functions and have awareness of the selection criteria to ensure they are job-related and free of adverse impact.
Step 3: Personalize the process
Beyond improving the selection decision to reduce bias, technologies can also localize and personalize the recruiting process to promote the attraction and retention of a more diverse recruitment pool. The typical automated hiring process is generic and impersonal and can serve to discourage candidates who might bring greater diversity and opportunities to the organization. By tailoring messages, providing personalized feedback and identifying untapped sources of talent, an intelligent system can uncover the 'diamonds in the rough' and encourage them through the process to maximize the opportunity to be hired.
Systems that can automatically adapt to candidates, highlight cultural fits to the organization independent of their surface characteristics and provide personalized encouragements and self-discovery can provide differentiation in the war for talent. When people feel recognized and valued and gain benefit from the recruiting process, they are encouraged and more likely to accept a hiring offer and recommend the organization to others.
Beyond the steps
The first step on a journey of change is recognizing the need to change. Society and technology are changing rapidly. Agility, innovation and adaptability are not just buzzwords; they are tenets for survival in business today. Inclusion and diversity aren't about compliance with regulations or keeping up with marketing trends, they're about understanding the importance of sense-making, idea generation and energy towards change.
Hiring, by necessity, is discriminatory. Hiring managers must discriminate (choose) among many candidates. Having a technology and consulting partner who can help focus business decisions towards the factors that truly drive business value can move organizations ahead strategically. The color of someone's skin, their gender and many other diversity factors can be easily seen and can distract people and algorithms. However, both people and algorithms can be trained to ignore distractors and focus on knowledge, skills and abilities that drive success in the role and for the broader organization.
Deciding who the people will be to drive an organization into the future is too important to leave up to chance and bias. Thoughtfulness in hiring, fair and predictive technology and trusting partnerships can improve both the success of organizations and the fairness in society.
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