Disruptive DEI: Recruiting a Diverse Workforce
Four ways to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion at your organization
Imagine you’re in the car and one of Pink Floyd’s hit songs starts playing on the radio…
“Money, get away,
You get a good job with good pay and you’re okay…”
Perhaps while tapping along to the beat of jangling coins in this classic, you start contemplating a new job yourself. Chances are, you’ll start by looking at job ads that highlight responsibilities and requirements of the role you seek.
As the song plays on, you might be surprised to know that the same year Money topped the charts — 1973 — the US Supreme Court’s decision to uphold a Pittsburgh ordinance that made it illegal for employers creating job ads to advertise specifically for men or women or use pronouns such as he or she.
While you would hope this solved the problem of gender bias in job descriptions, fast-forward to today and many companies still struggle when it comes to equitable recruiting.
Consider this: As you skim and filter jobs to apply for, you likely find some of the postings resonate with you more than others. While there may be multiple reasons why, researchers studying human psychology found that the language used in job descriptions is still a major culprit in creating engendered bias. Female candidates, the study found, are frequently “self-selecting out” before they even apply for some roles, including those in technology — a notoriously challenging space for women.
In 2022’s competitive labor market — where for every available worker there are still 1.8 open jobs — employers who want to be competitive (let alone equitable and diverse) have clear opportunities for improvement, especially considering the labor market’s post-pandemic “she-cession.”
Slalom’s Women in Data team has gathered four recommendations for making strides in your company’s diversity:
1. Evaluate your current diversity demographics
Look at metrics for each phase of the employee lifecycle by gender — including recruiting (number of candidates), hiring (percent of candidates converted to hire), retention, and promotions. You may want to also break this down by technical and non-technical roles. Feel free to include demographics by race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, veteran status, age, disability, or any other diversity information your HR systems have available. Then choose a strategy relevant to the part(s) of the employment lifecycle where you need the biggest diversity boost.
2. Diversify referrals
Did you know some employers have posed challenges to their teams to refer more women and candidates from underrepresented ethnic backgrounds? In the case of Pinterest, the company saw a 24% increase in women referred and a 55x increase in the percentage of candidates from underrepresented ethnic backgrounds. Intel took a different approach by paying double for referrals of underrepresented candidates. In turn, their underrepresented hires rose from 32% to 41% in the first year.
3. Avoid gendered wording in job postings
As mentioned earlier, language often carries bias, even if it’s unintentional. According to research from Duke University, examples of male-centric phrasing include:
- We’re looking for strong…
- Who thrive in a competitive atmosphere…
- Candidates who are assertive…
More neutral wording is:
- We’re looking for exceptional…
- Who are motivated by high goals…
- Candidates who are go-getters…
The differences may seem subtle, but they yield real differences in the demographics of who applies.
4. Create structured evaluations
One diversity-boosting method is to agree in advance on formal rules and criteria for hiring and/or promotion decisions. Another is to use skill-based assessments. According to a 2019 Pipeline report, companies that take a skills-based hiring approach see a 1–2% revenue increase for every 10% increase in gender equity. A third tactic is to compare more than one candidate at a time. This simple technique reduced gender bias in both hiring and promotion decisions. With the lack of upward mobility being a major driver for women leaving the tech industry, techniques like these improve fairness in promotion processes and improve retention.
At Slalom, job ad rewording was part of our strategy to diversify the recruiting pipeline. Both gender and race diversity were higher for job ads with strongly feminine wording compared to strongly masculine wording. Slalom nearly doubled the portion of underrepresented applicants of color (Black, Latinx and Native), which went up from 14% to 26%. Additionally, the percentage of female applicants went up almost 50%, from 37% to 54%. What’s more, the resulting hires saw an even larger boost in diversity — showing that the additional underrepresented applicants attracted by the inclusive job ads were strong applicants. (Statistics updated June 2023.)
Despite diversity, equity & inclusion (DEI) initiatives being top of mind today, we know it can be difficult to make progress. That’s why Slalom has taken what we’ve learned and applied it internally to create a new offering for our clients: the Inclusive Recruiting capability. This repeatable methodology and set of tools provides a full-scale solution that includes code, training, change management, analytics, and strategy to meet businesses where they’re at and help fine-tune equitable practices.
Just like the echoing jangle of coins that made Pink Floyd’s Money so distinctive, we know that small changes in recruiting can make a big difference in a company’s DEI efforts — and that the fruits of that impact are worth it.
Slalom is a global consulting firm that helps people and organizations dream bigger, move faster, and build better tomorrows for all. Learn more and reach out today.
