The Changing Face of Diversity
And Understanding WHY Diversity is Important for Your Company
Originally published on hirediversity.us December 20, 2017
By UB Ciminieri — Jobber Group
Diversity and Inclusion are priority topics today that many companies are discussing. They’ve even gone so far as to hire Chief D&I Officers to address the lack of diversity in their organizations. Unfortunately, most companies are failing to truly diversify their teams, instead hiring “token” diversity candidates so they can check a box and pad their diversity numbers. This strategy seems to be based on a definition of diversity that only includes ethnicity and gender. What most companies do not realize is that diversity is much more complex and can come from more than just the color of someone’s skin and whether they are male, female, trans, etc.
The other failure of diversity initiatives is they do not take into account WHY diversity is important to each individual company. In my opinion, most companies are not doing the work to understand why and how diversity can positively and negatively affect their business. Sure, there are diversity studies that give us big picture statistics about how diverse teams collaborate much better and companies are therefore much more successful. But not every company is the same. I truly believe diversity is just as much a strategy based on data as is sales and marketing. It should not be a flip of a coin.
Defining Diversity to Diversify Your Talent Strategy
We first need to correctly define diversity. Beyond ethnicity and gender, diversity is:
- Religion
- Socio-economic background
- Experience
- Education
- Geographic
- Thought
- Age
- LGBTQ
- Veterans
- Abilities
In terms of talent strategy, there is diversity in how and where we are sourcing candidates. Most companies get stuck in a rut of hiring from the same place, i.e. the university our CEO went to. All companies definitely continue to post the same old job descriptions on the same old websites — Indeed, Dice, Monster, their own career sites. And tradition keeps forcing people who, frankly, should not be interviewing to keep doing just that with no clear direction or training on how best to hire and build diverse teams without inherent gut feeling and bias.
The easiest way to begin diversifying your hiring is to start looking in places you wouldn’t normally look to find potential new candidates. Nothing freshens up a talent strategy more than looking for different kinds of people who we confidently can say will be successful in our company. Recruiting and hiring from these previously untapped groups will most certainly inject diversity into your organization, with great results. And it can become quite the differentiator for you in terms of attracting business and people who want to work for you.
Understanding Your Current Diverse Employees to Predict Future Need
A diverse talent strategy is only as good as understanding what makes your current employees successful. The easiest way to do that is to gather and analyze data about your most successful employees. What are the key elements that they share and what groups within the population share that same mix of elements? These elements are mindset and traits that align with your business and correlate directly to key performance metrics. They are defined specifically for your organization because the resulting behaviors may not correlate to success elsewhere.
Once identified and defined, these elements can very easily be targeted within groups whom your organization has never thought to recruit. As a result, you begin to build more diversity into your candidate pipeline just by focusing on finding your company’s “DNA” for successful employees. The great part is by understanding your elemental mix and crafting a more authentic employer brand story and marketing messaging, you’ll attract the right people naturally as well, reducing what many see as “waste of time” efforts to basically throw spaghetti on the wall and see if it sticks.
Continuous measurement of your elemental mix over time will also provide you with a roadmap to better predict the employees you’ll need to grow the company. With this in hand, and data to show where you can find right fit employees, you’ll have a clearer talent strategy driven by diversity.
Stop Talking About Diversity and Just Be Nike
My father always says “Be Nike.” What he really means is “Just Do It.”
Diversity is a hot topic and everyone loves to talk about it. Talk only gets us so far. We need to get past complaining about lack of diversity or arguing whether this study or that study is more relevant. Just do it. Bringing more diversity to your organization can happen in small steps without big showy initiatives. Understanding what diversity really means, and what it means for your organization, is half the battle and opens up so many more options for building great teams and organizations. After all, we need to be real here: leaders have goals and objectives to meet. Diversity initiatives and talent strategies need to align directly with these goals and objectives in the real world. Doing something just because it sounds nice is never effective, particularly when it comes to diversity and inclusion.
As a leader in your organization, take the initiative to start measuring and analyzing why your employees are successful. Not only will you have a clearer vision of how to continue to build your team, but also you’ll understand your current employees better. This only paves the way for better employee engagement and training that ultimately helps you build a stronger base of employees to add to.
Just do it.
About UB Ciminieri
UB has worn many hats in his career — business development, client development, solutions consultant, marketing, training — and it’s clear that these different roles have given him the passion for changing how companies attract, retain and develop talent to grow successfully. UB is an independent thinker, taking the initiative to think outside the box. He’s an early adopter of technology and social media and always thinking about how to engage and educate his peers and the community. Most importantly, he’s a connector, looking for connections where, on the surface, there might not be, but by building relationships and listening to the needs of others can help develop partnerships that are valuable to both parties.
