Hiring and Retaining Underrepresented Talent
While getting a diverse set of candidates through the door is important, it certainly isn’t sufficient for making sure that your top talent will stay. Beyond focusing on DEI in your recruiting efforts, building an inclusive work environment is key to keeping your teams diverse. In this guide, we’ve compiled a list of our resources to help explain why equity, diversity, and inclusion are imperative considerations for recruiting and retaining top talent.
Understanding the Problem
Equity, Diversity, Inclusion: What’s the Difference?
Getting candidates through the door is one thing, getting them to stay is an entirely different ball game. Understanding what Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion mean, is a necessary initial step to understanding how DEI, recruitment, and retention are interconnected. While the 3 words are often used interchangeably they refer to different things. Learn more about the distinctions between these notions and why it is essential to tackle all of them if your goal is to build a diverse organization, in our article Equity, Diversity, Inclusion: What’s the Difference.
Recruiting with Diversity in Mind
With an understanding of what DEI entail, you can now consider what gets in the way of building diverse teams in tech? In her article “DEI is the Duty of Every Recruiter” Technical Recruiter Moly Garner gets into some of the recruiting observations she’s made throughout her career, and how they get in the way of building diverse teams. For instance, Garner suggests that there tends to be “a recipe” when it come to Software Engineer hires. Something along the lines of:
Top CS School + Experience at Another Enterprise Tech Co. = Offer-able Candidate
This will exclude up to 85% of underrepresented professionals from the candidate pool, she suggests. Read Garner’s article to find more tips for rethinking your hiring strategies, and disrupting recruiting norms that lead to homogenous teams.
Inclusive Work Environments
Once you’ve come up with a plan for diverse and inclusive recruiting, you’ll want to understand how you can ensure your company culture is an inclusive and equitable one.
You should care about inclusion because chances are your candidates and employees do too. A recent McKinsey survey found that employees who have experienced microaggressions at work are more likely to consider leaving their jobs.Moreover, the US workforce is growing more diverse, and young job seekers are increasingly prioritizing diversity and inclusion in their career decisions. Glassdoor surveyed its active and passive job seekers to understand the importance of diversity in the job search process, they found that two-thirds (67%) of job seekers consider workplace diversity an important factor when considering employment opportunities.
Suffice it to say, inclusion matters to your employees, and if you don’t start prioritizing it, chances are you’ll push away talented employees, and end up with a monolithic workplace. And a lack of diversity, aside from being inequitable, translates to stagnation in today’s business environment.
Inclusion in Remote Work
The recent shift to remote work has complicated the question of what it means to be an inclusive company, and as companies around the globe make the transition to virtual work environments, people are increasingly asking “How can I foster inclusion in my remote team?”.
Remote work can certainly minimize many of the biases common to physical workplaces. Remote work is not, however, immune to diversity and inclusion challenges. As the world shifts to a new virtual normal, it is essential to be cognizant of the equity and inclusion challenges that remote work introduces, or fails to resolve. You can learn about tech solutions for inclusion on remote teams in our Remote DEI guidebook. Key challenges discussed include biases that tend to plague virtual meetings, inequitable work environments, as well as the difficulty of voicing diversity and inclusion concerns in remote work environments.
Trust is Foundational to a Healthy Remote Company Culture
Both of these factors are in some form connected to trust. Remote work environments can lend themselves to isolation as it can be easy to stick to work conversations and skip the usual watercooler conversations that organically arise in an office. As a result, and especially in cases where co-workers have not previously shared an office, it can be difficult to create genuine connections. Thus, it organically creates a sense of trust amongst team members. Likewise among the reasons why many in the US work long hours is to demonstrate their effort and commitment to employers who can’t see them and may not trust that they are being productive.
You can learn more about the value of a trusting company culture here.
For a more comprehensive of some of the equity and inclusion challenges commonly faced in remote work environments, along with some strategies for tackling these challenges, download Divercity’s Remote DEI Guidebook.
Ultimately hiring and retaining top talent is a matter of creating equitable and inclusive recruiting strategies, and work environments that enable your employees to feel a sense of belonging in the company, and to ultimately be able to thrive and achieve their fullest potential. In order to ensure that all employees have a fair chance at thriving and achieving that sense of belonging it is imperative to be mindful of common equity and inclusion challenges that may arise.
