Believe Us: Retention Strategy is Recruitment Strategy

The following was written by Karla Monterroso, our VP of Programs.

One of the many things I love about our direct service facing work with young folks is just how damn honest they are. If you want to know the real deal, get into conversation with a young person. Over the course of the last year and a half, we’ve really tried to embrace that feedback as an advantage and learning opportunity for the partners that we are involved with. We do not put a bright shiny facade on what it means to work with imperfect people or partners, it does no one any good. As an external actor we have the unique opportunity to be legit and candid with lots of people, who quite frankly are not positioned to get the unvarnished truth. This experience with them has confirmed our belief that retention strategy is recruitment strategy.

We keep saying this to people who approach us, but I’m not sure people are ingesting it: here are three examples as to why we know this is the case.

1. The internal grapevine: We have taken our students into companies and employees of color will quickly tell them “Don’t work here” or “Yup, it’s safe here” — they are also telling other people.
2. The external grapevine: Students will go to events and/or work for companies and immediately people will ask them what they thought — and they’ll tell them. Frankly.
3. Your relationship to feedback: The industry is starting from pretty low starting point when it comes to inclusion, the expectation is not that you knock the work out of the ballpark on the first swing. But you have to demonstrate that you are growing and learning as a result of the work or your DEI work will get written off as cosmetic.

Lets break these down, shall we?

The Internal Grapevine

This year we had our first ever Tech Trek. We brought 40 students in from all over the country. They visited 11 companies and did a number of different activities while they were here. The students were predominantly Freshmen. Gender and racial parity was 50/50. Our TAP team debriefed them after every company getting feedback on the experience. In some companies, when the students walked through, employees of color would stop them and ask what they were doing there. In a few instances we had people tell students, “Don’t work here, I’m trying to get out. This is not the place for you.” Students were supremely perceptive when a company was trying to create gloss over authentic organizational pain. We were able to turn around that feedback for all companies, so they knew where they stood in the eyes of our student body.

I was pretty amazed at how much money a company could spend on diversity initiatives meant to attract people of color, only to find they had built a sieve. The differentiator for a company that wins the battle for talent is that they don’t label these as “isolated incidents.” These anecdotes are a barometer of company culture.

The External Grapevine

Some months ago I attended a Slack Earthtones event. Earthtones is an ERG for people of color in the Slack community. It was a really lovely space. Lots of technologists of color came out to participate. The event content was great, the space for candor was really intentionally built — in short the event was treated with the kind of respect it should be treated with. I cannot tell you how many different people of color talked to me during and after the event about Stewart Butterfield. I had no fewer than 10 people comment that he was at the event, but not centered in the event. That it was clear he was listening and learning- that it was great the CEO was in the room, but allowed his staff to lead the room. They wondered what he must be like as a manager and as a leader. They wistfully commented how great it must be to work at Slack. By the time the second Slack Earthtones event came about, all of those details created a space where there was a waitlist for the event itself.

This is all to say: Your rep will follow you. What your leadership participates in and how they participate are indicators to the communities you want to attract about whether or not your company is the place for them.

Every time I have had a Slack team member at a panel for Code2040 or speak to students, they have talked about how genuinely they believe their CEO is the head of diversity and how meaningful and important that is to them. They are willing to be in this journey with all it’s imperfections because of how strongly they believe.

Your Relationship to Feedback

A few weeks ago, as we were winding down our fellows program, our partners at Intel had the opportunity to listen to honest feedback from the 16 fellows we had placed there.

The feedback was both positive and constructive, ranging from physical space and cultural climate to workplace opportunity for people of color. As our students discussed their experiences with Intel’s Danielle Brown, Chief of Staff to the CEO and Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer, she responded with some insight that might be helpful to our community of partners.

“The workforce has changed so drastically. We are moving from a culture that required people to come in and do work and leave themselves at the door, to a culture that addresses the whole person. We are learning how to be a company that knows how to honor the ‘whole person.’ You cannot be that kind of workplace without addressing issues of race, gender, class, ability, etc. Thank you for pioneering that work with us.”

There are lots of things about this that I think matter. One, someone who reported to the CEO was sent to participate in the feedback session. Two, no one defended the company to any piece of constructive feedback. Three, the leader demonstrated an understanding of the macro workplace issues at hand.

Because of the way the feedback was received, the fellows felt heard and like their participation and contributions were valued and would be applied to Intel’s efforts to transform its culture. Later, in conversation with the team, Intel shared the various initiatives they had put into place to address the retention of their staff: retention hotlines that operate as safe and private spaces for employees to talk about their current work experiences, progression studies that explore the complexities and factors contributing to retention challenges, and a leadership symposium for 900 of its staff members to build diversity competencies.

Again, it’s not imperative to have a solution completely figured out, but you should be able to acknowledge the problem and address the contributing factors and actual issues at hand.

Learn from Social Change Organizations

Social change enterprises often operate off of a “Theory of Change”. It means you have have an opinion on what actions your organization takes to create the kind of change you want to ultimately see. So much of the DEI work is divorced from strategy. It’s divorced from an understanding of the issue at hand and the different levers you think need to be pulled in order to create the change you want to see. This is basic change management. Your people have to know the direction, they have to understand the process that they will follow to create that direction, and then you have to motivate that change throughout your workforce.

I cannot see a world in which we fix this problem until the retention issue is tackled in earnest. We will create any number of programs and replicate the diversity industrial complex that has attached itself to finance, banking, entertainment — you name it. We will be left with the same lackluster outputs, until we understand and own that this work does not have any shortcuts. You can fill the top of your employee interview funnel with diverse, bright, engaged leaders and all the work will be for naught. They will leave within the year- hell, they may not even make it through a broken interview process.

Do you really want to throw your money into a bottomless pit?