The Subtle Art of Hiring a Diverse Workforce — Part III : Building Bridges

This article is the third part of a series on Diversity and Inclusion in the workplace I am writing with my friend and fellow recruiter Caroline Chavier. The previous ones can be found 👉 here and 👉 here.

If D&I must be a priority to everyone in an organisation, the Talent Acquisition (TA) team is the entry point of every future employee. They therefore have a crucial impact on the development of your workforce, and a direct responsibility on the tangible implementation of your company values and choices.

As sourcers, recruiters or TA, it is our responsibility to go beyond the standard anti-discrimination policies in place and offer innovative solutions that proactively make way for a more diverse workforce — such as flexible work options, extended parental leave, community advocacy and more. But this is easier said than done, so I’ll try to give you a few tips!

🧑‍🏫 Before you get to work, it is important to take a moment to reflect: What do you want to achieve?
Set yourself goals and measure your progress! Those can be: the number of minoritized people in your pipeline for a given role, the number of actual hires by role or level, the number of applicants vs sourced candidates for a given role…
Useful metrics should include not just raw hiring numbers, but also percentage of women, and people of color in management and executive positions, salary parity, retention rates, etc.
👉 Please note that Caroline and myself work and hire in France, where gathering information about employees’ ethnic or social background and classifying them accordingly is illegal and considered discriminatory. This system, designed to protect employees, is paradoxically somehow keeping us from accurately measuring the impact of our actions and extracting significant data. But that’s the law 🤷‍♀️

⏱ I must warn you: Diversity and Inclusion efforts take time. Very often, your stakeholders will want to see immediate results for your actions (and allocated budget and time!), but unfortunately that’s not how it works. Depending on what you set out to achieve, you must realise that it might take months, even years before you start seeing a significant sign of success.
Of course you will start with “quick fixes”, immediate actions to be taken to kickstart the change. But D&I requires deep, structural changes and you can’t move a mountain in a day!

💪 If you need help convincing your stakeholders of the validity of your D&I efforts, Michelle Kim gathered all you need to build your business case here.

Building bridges

🌉 In the long term, creating meaningful interactions with communities can be a good way to build bridges towards minoritized potential candidates. These communities can evolve around regular meetups, Slack spaces, social media hashtags…
Build or support communities you feel close to.
You can support their actions by attending or publicising their events, reaching out to their organisers, taking part in their community — online and offline. If your company has a budget, you can offer to help them by subsidising premium accounts on the tools they’re using, hosting their events, paying for their merch, giving them access to your network and introducing them to key connections — ask what you can do to help them grow!

🤝 There are many ways you can take part/support an underrepresented community. But whatever you do: stay true. Don’t barge in with your job descriptions in hand, expecting to be recognised as a savior. These organisations are based on volunteering, and trying to change things for the better so go there only with the same mindset, not trying to grab a return on investment.
Remember that these communities exist precisely because at some point they considered the only way to be heard was to group up and face the rest of the world.
Be respectful. Listen. Amplify. Be an ally.

🌈 There’s nothing worse than rainbow washing. It crushes the trust these communities are built on. If you just put on a marketing D&I mask but do not deliver on your claims, candidates will quickly see through it as they advance through your process (or worse, once they are hired!). The results on your employer branding, as well as on the employee engagement, will be devastating (but well-deserved).

👨🏽‍🎓 With the objective of diversifying your teams and integrating more junior employees, you should also consider recruiting for internships, partnering with schools, attending career fairs. This will give some students the crucial first work experience they sometimes have such a hard time getting on their resume. It will also give you a chance to scout candidates with great potential, and why not — offer them a permanent position in your company after they graduate!

Of course this strategy will only be beneficial if you put in place the right ecosystem to welcome junior hires and mentor them so they can learn and grow in your organisation. Make sure the existing team agrees with this decision, and has the stability and the skills necessary to offer an ecosystem in which junior hires can thrive.
It sounds silly that I have to say it but: recruiting junior hires must never ever be a decision based on cost-cutting. Don’t recruit a junior person if you don’t have the means to mentor them properly.

Make your actions resonate

📢 Align with your providers. It’s time to put your money where your mouth is! What’s the point of improving your sourcing and your process if your providers (recruitment agencies and consulting companies) ruin all your hard work?
They carry a great responsibility in your employer branding efforts. After all, they approach candidates in your name! It’s important to share your objectives with them and efficiently convey your message so they respect it with prospective candidates.
You can even translate your expectations in the commercial contract, in terms of percentage of minoritized candidates introductions for example.

🔎 The same way you need to align with your agencies, you can scout the market and find job boards oriented towards underrepresented people. Veni Kunche does a great job curating an exciting newsletter including resources and a job board in an online community called Diversify Tech. Several communities (Tech Ladies, Elpha, WIMLDS…) include a job board page on their website. For now, their audience is mostly based in the US, but I can’t wait until they become global, and/or that similar initiatives blossom in Europe! Sifted precisely compiled a very useful list for Europe here.

Right now, in France at least, this role is mostly taken on by nonprofits and associations: don’t hesitate to search for them, read their websites and learn more!

Speakers, events, experts

🧑🏽‍🏫 There is no denying that the public space right now is mostly taken up by the same kind of voices. No, I’m not going to say whose voices, but we know who they are!

I believe we should all commit to bringing new people on the scene.
Diversifying the voices is about getting different points of view and experiences, opening the thinking, getting more good friction.
Friction can be a positive force, whatever kind of group we’re talking about: company, organisation, meeting, conference.

🎤 If you’re organising an event, please look closely at your panel: does it really reflect a diversity of experiences, life paths and opinions?
As a public speaker myself, I decided a year ago that I wouldn’t attend events in which I’d be the only woman to speak. Whenever possible, I would also recommend speakers from underrepresented backgrounds to enrich the roster.
As an event organiser, I always try to invite people from underrepresented backgrounds and put them in the spotlight.
And that means: planning ahead! Too often, event organisers realise — usually when getting publicly called out after announcing their speakers list — the lack of diversity on their roster, and they go into panic mode two weeks before the date, frantically reaching out to any woman or POC ready to step in. Don’t do that. That’s disrespectful and messy. Underrepresented people should never be tokenised to deflect the bad press you’re scared of getting.

📗In France, Les Expertes publish a list of women, experts in their fields, available for interviews and conferences. On a global scale, Reflect Reality and Fempire compiled lists of minoritized scientists, engineers, academics… ready to take the mic and share their knowledge!

Underrepresented people must not stay restricted to speaking at underrepresented communities meetups and events. They should be everywhere, and become normally-represented people. Push their representations, normalize it. It’s about creating role models, identifying and inspiring figures for anyone who might not feel confident just yet.

Communicating for, and with everyone

💬Communication will be a key part of your D&I efforts. As a recruiter, you aim at widening your talent pool. As HR, you want to have an employee communication that speaks to everyone in your company.
It should be going both ways: reach out to everyone, and also make your communication accessible to everyone.

Your career page is often the first thing a candidate will see of your company, so it’s worth taking time to refine it. Your job descriptions must be truthful, detailed, and exciting enough so that the right people will take the step and apply.

🖱Consider making your career page accessible to people with disabilities. Reach out to the dev team, or to the agency building your website and talk to them about the Web Accessibility Initiative.

• Lindsey Kopacz does an amazing job giving technical advice on optimizing your code and your design for people with disabilities on her blog A11ywithLindsey.
• Coralie Collignon also wrote an amazing list of dev guidelines for accessibility.
• Karwai Pun and her team at gov.uk specialise in design and UX research, her findings are published here.

Accessibility can translate as: the contrast of text vs background color, the code design to accommodate screen readers, alternative description of images, menus easily operable without a mouse, etc. If you want to learn further on the subject of inclusive design, this book by Regine Gilbert is a must-read.

📜Try to keep your job ads as gender-neutral as possible. Of course some languages (such as French) do not make it easy, but if you are communicating in English, consider using a text analyser such as Textio (paying tool) or Gender decoder (free). They will help you identify and correct your vocabulary to make it more efficient and universal, and appeal to every candidate.

📊 I also suggest mentioning results-based objectives instead of listing skills, whenever possible. Indeed, some studies have identified an effect known as confidence gap, which seems that women will apply if they tick 100% of requirements, when men will apply with only 60% of the requirements. Even if these studies have recently been put in doubt, listing expected results will help potential candidates understand what the job will be like on a day to day basis, and what will be expected of them.

👩🏼‍⚖️ It is required by law in the USA that every job description must include an EEO statement. But what is an EEO and why should you consider adding one too?
The Equal Employment Opportunity statement is a public statement, appearing on your website and/or on your job ads, explaining your commitment to offer an equal treatment to applications, regardless of the candidates’ background or history.
EEO doesn’t guarantee that people of underrepresented groups will get hired. The purpose of EEO regulations is to make sure nobody will face rejection or difficulties because they’re part of a minoritized group.
Keep in mind that the EEO statement is one of the first glimpse candidates will have of your company culture and values. Once again, being truthful is key.
You can find interesting examples of EEO statements here.

Here is also the EEO statement I wrote when working for Heetch:

🌈 Heetch embraces diversity and equal opportunity for everyone 🌍 We provide a safe and inclusive work environment. We are committed to building a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills.

📸 Think about your image! Some stock pictures banks have been made available, offering more inclusive representations, and avoiding clichés.
My favourite free resources: Nappy, CreateHer, GenderPhotos.
They’re great to illustrate your views on social media, on your website or on your company blog if, for some reason, you can’t use actual employees pictures.

Conclusion

As you can see, D&I efforts from the Talent Acquisition team (and from the whole company) start way before we actually source a single candidate. It is a marathon, not a sprint, and it must always be in sync with your company’s values and culture.
Honesty and transparency are the key: it’s better to start small, focusing on a few points we exposed here and then amplify your efforts, rather than make promises you can’t keep, or that are blatant marketing tricks!

With these changes in place, you should see more incoming applicants in your pipeline. You might need to enrich it further by sourcing before you start interviewing, and that’s what we’ll see in your next article! 🕵🏼

✒️ Mathilde Kurzawa is a tech recruiter. Co-organiser of the Sourcecon Paris chapter, she’s also involved in several nonprofits and associations. Active on Twitter and passionate about OSINT, she is a semi-finalist of the 2020 Sourcing Grandmaster Challenge. Mathilde is particularly interested in the topics of D&I in the tech environment. She aims at creating safe spaces for everyone to express their talent and individuality, regardless of gender, ethnicity, age, or else 😊
Her motto : be good, and have fun !

✒️ Caroline Chavier is the CEO of The Allyance.one. Highly involved in promoting diversity in engineering teams, Caroline is the co-founder of the Paris Women in Machine Learning & Data Science meet-up. In 2019, she was be an Inclusion & Diversity co-chairwoman at the RecSys Conference in Copenhagen. Caroline has always been passionate about encouraging women to network, speak at conferences and present their work to peers. She is also a passionate tech recruiter, always ready to tweet!