Why recruiting diversely puts the human into HR

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Data and AI, together with quotas and education, are helping organisations become more diverse, inclusive and representative of their stakeholders.

• Boards with more diversity perform noticeably better than those without.
• Mentoring and role model programmes may help companies create inclusive workplaces.
• Recruitment firms championing diversity will generate a richer candidate pool for clients.
• Hiring managers and leaders need to be aware of their biases to ensure fair hiring.
• Video and text analysis software can help remove unconscious bias from the hiring process.

When former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi stood down in August 2018, the pool of women (and ethnic minorities) leading America’s largest companies shrank again. Caucasians account for 73% of the leadership teams at the 16 Fortune 500 companies who reported their diversity efforts. Women make up just 6.4% (in itself an all-time high) of CEOs in these businesses.

Making boardrooms more representative is not just morally right and commercially sensible, but the best strategic response to the rise of technology. In the coming years, where huge technological changes will impact the workplace and the relationship between people and work, it is one of the best ways to respond to the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). Human intelligence – with its infinite diversity – is irreplaceable by any machine.

What are companies doing to achieve C-suite diversity goals? How are they making the shift from exclusively women-focused initiatives towards minority representation, creating more inclusive team dynamics from the top down? 

Working Towards a Change Mindset 

The human brain sometimes is unconsciously biased and this makes its way into companies and their hiring practices. Hiring managers and senior leaders need to be aware of their unconscious biases to ensure fair hiring outcomes. But bias still finds a home in gendered job titles, as Asma Youssef, Principal, Page Executive, explains: “Even today, gender-biased job titles still exist, such as any role ending in men or man. We encourage our recruiters to advocate the use of gender-neutral job titles and embrace fair equality of opportunity.”

“Millions of people have taken; Harvard’s Implicit Association Test to measure their prejudices and the data reveals a majority have a bias towards their own race. Assumptions made about candidates have lasting implications upon who is hired and on who gains promotion to the leadership team.”

Assumptions made about candidates have lasting implications upon who is hired and on who gains promotion to the leadership team.

Careernetworx CEO Gail Tolstoi-Miller recommends two words to challenge one’s own unconscious bias: “So what?” She says that hiring managers need to accept that interviewing a different gender or nationality from their own can give rise to bias and, whenever they make a decision about a candidate, ask themselves that question. Youssef adds that “recruitment firms championing diversity will have a trickledown effect into the diverse candidate pool they generate for clients.”

Recruitment firms championing diversity will have a trickledown effect into the diverse candidate pool they generate for clients.

Diversity Quotas Work

Most workplaces believe in and operate on the basis of meritocracy. But hiring reality is often quite different, with quotas a necessity given the challenges women, people of colour and other minorities face navigating their way to the top. Although misunderstood and sometimes contentious, quotas are effective in correcting under-representation of minority groups.

“Quotas worked when nothing else did,” explains Rana Nawas, Ellevate Network’s Dubai Chapter President. “With the introduction of quotas, many highly qualified women have been hired to join boards. More women on boards will bring more women in the C-suite. That’s when the positive impact on business outcomes become evident.”

A study by McKinsey Diversity Matters, discovered that boards with top-quartile diversity performed better than less diverse ones, with returns of equity (ROE) that were 53% higher on average. These more diverse boards also contributed towards 14% higher earnings before tax and, astoundingly, as Credit Suisse explain in a similar report, “large-cap companies with at least one woman on the board have outperformed their peer group with no women on the board by 26% over the last six years.”

Technology Creating Diverse Leadership Pipelines

Technology adds to the complexity of business today. Traditional leadership teams and boards can lack the diverse skill sets required to face the complexities that the fourth industrial revolution (the Internet of Things, or IoT) will bring. Tackling these challenges requires agile leadership that itself is diverse and that fosters new thinking and reinvention.

Headquartered in Amsterdam, Booking.com’s technology team boasts 1,600 people of 80 different nationalities. As women comprise half the company’s customer base, the e-commerce platform is directly addressing the gender gap and currently has more women in tech jobs than industry averages.

How do they recruit? Booking.com avoids platforms like LinkedIn, taking advantage of tech-specific online platforms such as stackoverflow, a knowledge-sharing and career building website with an audience of over 50 million developers, and Dribbble, a platform where designers inspire themselves and secure jobs.

Educating Through Coaching

Mentorship programmes have become increasingly important initiatives. As Rupert Forster, PageGroup’s Managing Director for China, explains, “Mentors and role models at work should be visible and consistently display what great looks like.” Companies can display their commitment to creating an inclusive workplace culture by launching diversity training and implementing mindset coaching. Better frameworks can make more people aware they are capable of achieving greatness despite traditional structural and business challenges. Such initiatives enable companies to demonstrate strong value systems, which can help in recruiting the right talent across all management levels.

“As a recruitment agency, we emphasise the values of our clients and the significance of their D&I initiatives while making executive and senior management hires,” concludes Forster.

As a recruitment agency, we emphasise the values of our clients and the significance of their D&I initiatives while making executive and senior management hires.

PageGroup aims to build the same kind of teams internally as it does externally. The Shared Services Centre in Barcelona, for example, has a leadership team made up of three women and four men, which itself mirrors the structure of the executive board, made up of four women and five men. Although just the first steps on the way towards gender equality, having a representative board and leadership team is a company priority.

AI Aids Hiring Managers in Avoiding Bias

If making companies more representative of diversity and more human is key to countering fears about artificial intelligence, it is worth looking at how AI can be harnessed to help.

AI is disrupting almost every industry and the recruitment sector is no different. Used well, AI can help companies become more representative. Take the work being done by HireVue, which is attempting to solve the speed-quality problem in hiring by using AI to challenge traditional biases

Unilever used HireVue to place 800 people from a pool of 250,000 candidates for its Future Leaders Programme. The software produced a 16% increase in hires from more diverse backgrounds. Other tools such as Textio, an augmented writing platform, use AI to analyse bias in the language of job descriptions and adverts, helping companies recruit a more diverse workforce. In 2018 Textio was named one of the World’s Most Innovative Companies for Data Science for Data Science.

Using Textio, Expedia altered its job posts to become gender-neutral in tone – and roles were filled eight days faster than job posts that reflected unconscious bias. As far as executive recruitment is concerned, the tech not only assesses the candidate’s functional expertise, but also their cultural and emotional cognisance, helping to identify company fit in a candidate more quickly and with greater accuracy.

Diversity isn’t optional. Not in the workforce or the boardroom. Representative leaders of representative companies more accurately reflect the diversity of the people that make up political regulators, the supply chain and the customer base.

That makes commercial sense. And it is common sense if we want to keep business human

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Data and AI, together with quotas and education, are helping organisations become more diverse, inclusive and representative of their stakeholders.

• Boards with more diversity perform noticeably better than those without.
• Mentoring and role model programmes may help companies create inclusive workplaces.
• Recruitment firms championing diversity will generate a richer candidate pool for clients.
• Hiring managers and leaders need to be aware of their biases to ensure fair hiring.
• Video and text analysis software can help remove unconscious bias from the hiring process.

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