John Vlastelica reporting for LinkedIn shares the two barriers preventing organisations from significantly improving diversity recruiting efforts.
“Listen, I support diversity, but I gotta get this sales position filled asap — it’s killing me to have this territory uncovered.” — Sales Hiring Manager
“I appreciate the value of diversity, really, but we’ve had years of success hiring against this profile. We know that people from [brand company, pedigreed school] do better here — they’re predictably good hires, and ramp up quickly.” — Engineering Hiring Manager
If you’re a recruiter, you’ve probably heard hiring managers share some version of these two statements before. Your team members understand the value of diversity and inclusiveness, but they “still have a department to run and/or products to sell.” Therefore, diversity is not their number one priority.
“We’ve worked with thousands of hiring managers and corporate recruiters and during focus groups for our hiring manager, talent advisor, or diversity training, we hear this kind of feedback. Good people, who want to help, but also feel incredible pressure to hire quickly. Which means, we — as Talent Advisors — must do all the right things to ensure we’re:
- Widening the aperture early, and not going after ideal candidate profiles
- Improving access and casting a wide net so that our sourcing efforts include more people from underrepresented groups
- Mitigating bias via effective interviewing (maybe even requiring all hiring managers to get a license to hire)
And not only that — we must also look for opportunities to shift our internal culture, which can be a major barrier to diversity ROI, away from its 90%+ focus on speed and predictability.”
Vlastelica emphasises there are internal factors – i.e. within organisation’s control. They largely stem from the cultural norms that reinforce certain expectations and behaviours.
A culture centred on speed can impact diversity ROI
For many organisations, hiring speed is a priority. In reviewing metrics, time to fill is regularly viewed as the primary focus, weighted most heavily by hiring managers.
“But if speed is the primary focus of both recruiters and hiring managers, then anything that’s perceived to slow us down will be met with resistance. Even with good intentions, a lot of diversity efforts can fail because of the underlying pressure to fill roles quickly. And I get it — I’ve been a hiring manager, and by the time my [requisition] is approved, I’m probably already feeling incredible urgency to hire. Maybe the person I’m backfilling resigned three weeks ago, and this requisition took another three weeks to get approved — I may feel six weeks “behind” before I even meet with my recruiter to start the recruiting process.”
In an interview with a CHRO at a well-known tech company, Vlastelica gained a new insight to reflect on this as a cultural issue.
“If a people manager in my company is leading a team that is so fragile that they can’t wait an extra 2, 3, 4 weeks to support something that is so critical to our company’s short and long term success — diversity and inclusion — then maybe they shouldn’t be a hiring manager at all. But I don’t blame them — we run lean, and so we have some cultural and resourcing issues to deal with, internally, before we expect our managers to accept a slightly slower time to fill as a tradeoff worth making.
“This really spoke to me — it highlighted how much of the root issue stems from deeper issues related to the pain of running so lean, of putting so much pressure on our teams to fill roles quickly.”
So, what’s the solution?
More frank conversations are needed with executive leadership teams about resourcing, and the issue of reinforcing speed over quality or diversity. Organisations must also communicate their commitment to diversity in a way that allows requisitions teams to experience longer times to fill in the short-term.
Vlastelica reflects on a panel with diversity leaders, who shared: “when they moved to requiring diverse candidate slates, they did in fact experience a longer time to fill (TTF). They significantly improved representation in key categories, but TTF worsened by nine days. That was the short-term investment and trade-off that they made to address a much bigger inequity. So, did average TTF stay nine days longer forever? Nope. Just six months later, it returned to the pre-diverse slate requirement stage — those nine days disappeared. They just needed to develop some new muscles.”
Hiring predictability cubs diversity efforts
Hiring cultures that rely on predictability hold back diversity efforts. Relying too heavily on predictable hiring may seem like the easiest and fasts way to fill requisitions. Many hiring managers trust the record they’ve had successfully sourcing and filling roles. When recruiters suggest alternative candidate profiles, it feels like a risk and can receive pushback. Middle managers are heavily motivated to minimise risk, not to take advantage of opportunity. Differences are perceived as risky.
“Now, no one — especially me — is suggesting that hiring a [black engineering manager, latinx sales person, or female investment banker] is risky, or should take longer BECAUSE they are [black, latinx, a woman]. BUT, if the culture reinforces a norm of avoiding risk and walking familiar paths, and some people from underrepresented groups aren’t commonly found in those trusted companies and schools, then of course some hiring managers will go to the profiles that feel predictable, to the profiles that have worked out in the past, to ‘sameness.’”
Organisations often have to reinforce through role-modelling to shift the mindset of management and hiring teams when scaling up.
For example, a co-founder of a fin-tech company consciously targeted women for roles that had been traditionally filled by men. She wanted diversity on her team at all levels. And she recognised that to get her hiring managers hiring more women, she needed to lead by example.
“So, she’d bring in candidates that didn’t all graduate with the same degrees from the same schools, who didn’t work at the same companies that all banking firms usually hired from (which were almost all men). She diversified her sources and profiles, and then when the risks were called out in the interviewing debrief meeting by her traditionally-pedigreed interviewers, she talked about how she’d mitigate those risks, and ultimately took solid bets on people who were very capable (hard and soft skills matched, motivation to learn was strong).
“In fact, she consciously moved away from a consensus-oriented hiring decision making model to one where she made the final call. This was a cultural shift for her and her team — consensus, up to this point, was how most decisions were made. But, she moved away from consensus to both widen the aperture to get talent that had been regularly overlooked AND to role model the kind of bets she wanted her leadership team to make. In the end, she shifted culture by pointing to successful hires her team had made that fit outside the “sameness” of past target candidate profiles. She made it culturally “safe” to hire differences.”
What can you do to shift the focus away from speed and predictability?
Many organisational challenges, even in talent acquisition, are internal.
“Many of the biggest barriers to diversity success are systemic — they exist across our company and are embedded in our culture. They’re not caused by just one hiring manager, or a lack of a sourcing tool, or lack of budget to recruit from different schools. So when we’re operating as talent advisors, and are coaching our top business leaders on the barriers to success in diversity, it’s critical we bring up our culture’s hyper-focus on speed and predictability in hiring.”
If your organisation and executive leaders are genuinely committed to effect systemic change, it’s time for some honest, frank conversations about short-term trade-offs vs. long term gains to improve diversity and inclusion.
“I’d start by looking at five things that will demonstratively shift your underlying culture:
Lead an honest conversation with your HR leadership team about how lean your teams are, how much pressure your leaders are under to fill roles quickly, and how we can partner to create some slack in the system so that the hiring manager’s focus goes beyond just speed.
Don’t wait to talk with your hiring managers about diversity for the first time until they have a req open. You missed the window — by the time the requistion is opened, the urgency is already present and dominating the hiring need. We need to talk to hiring managers about diversity pre-funnel.”
- Emphasise quality and diversity metrics over time-to-fill metrics – identify metrics to measure progress with your business leaders inclusive of diversity goals.
- Move away from requiring consensus in hiring decisions – consensus requirements are generally bad for diversity if you’re trying to hire new profiles, as consensus decisions are often the safe decisions.
- Get your diversity champions to role model the behaviour you want represented in your culture – culture is largely the behaviours you reward and punish, and it comes from stories, not posters on the wall. Help your executives to make hiring decisions that weight “culture add” over “culture fit” and, when their “different” new hires are a wild success, capture that as an example story to reinforce with their peers.
Speed and predictability are connected. It can be tough to challenge the “muscles” we’ve developed to source and select candidates quickly.
Vlastelica summarises, “Developing new muscles to source, engage, and interview talent that doesn’t fit our sameness profiles takes time. But the ROI is there — and it’ll become our new-normal (and “fast”) if we identify and act on the cultural shifts that need to take place, so that we all develop these underdeveloped hiring muscles. Will those cultural shifts take months or years? Yep, sorry — nothing this challenging is quick to fix. But it very well could be the most strategic, long term, highest ROI work we do.”