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Recruiting and retaining talented employees from various backgrounds is important for many reasons. Diverse teams are likely to outperform their competitors in profitability. As well, your organization can better cater to diverse consumer needs while enhancing workforce innovation.
Unfortunately, many organizations today experience difficulties in filling up their talent pipeline with talents of diverse backgrounds. This means that they are not able to meet their representation objectives nor experience the benefits of having a diverse and inclusive workforce.
If your organization is facing a pipeline problem when it comes to hiring more diverse talents, it is essential to take corrective steps to resolve this issue. This article will discuss five areas to help you troubleshoot what might be causing the pipeline problem, and strategies to mitigate this.
Related: Unconventional Ways to Source Diverse Talent
1. Barriers and goals
What is the representation goal for your organization? Perhaps your company may want to increase the percentage of women leaders within the C suite by a certain percentage or are looking to have more talents from under-represented backgrounds occupying senior leadership positions. The goal can be either quantitative or qualitative. Whatever your vision may be, the vision must be clear and have specific metrics associated with it.
Once the company goal is clear, then move on to the individual experience. Underrepresented talents experience various barriers in their careers. Identify what barriers exist for your target groups. This could show up in ways such as not feeling supported by colleagues or opportunity gaps.
Consider how these individual barriers will affect their career trajectory. Identifying any existing processes in the company can help to mitigate these barriers in the short term.
Related: 4 Criteria Diverse Talents Use to Evaluate Their Prospective Employers
2. Reconsider your talent-sourcing strategies
What do your current talent-sourcing strategies look like? If you’re looking at your existing talent pipeline, where are your talents currently coming from? Do you feel that that is meeting the representation goal that you have at the organizational level? If you’re looking to have a different result and increase representation in your organization, you may need to reconsider your talent-sourcing strategies.
If the company is not meeting its representation goals and are looking for more talents of under-represented backgrounds, then you can’t be doing the same thing that you have been doing before. There has to be some sort of a shift. Whether you are innovating the existing strategy jobs that are working very well or you’re trying something completely different, you have to be doing something different. This is not an exception when looking at your talent-sourcing strategy.
So what does the sourcing strategy look like? It is imperative to understand that you cannot expect a different result if you’re doing the same thing as you have been doing before, so make sure that your sourcing strategy reflects that change somehow.
Related: Struggling With Hiring Right Now? It’s Time To Go All-In on Diversity
3. Interpretation of assessment criteria
How are you currently evaluating and assessing candidates? You may already have a set method on how you evaluate and assess the candidates. But what if it is hindering your underrepresented talents from even applying? While the criteria stay the same when it comes to skills or experience, the interpretation will have to change.
For example, when evaluating cultural fit, many companies evaluate the cultural fit based on shared personal interests. This can turn away talents coming from different backgrounds. So instead of similar personal interests, focus on evaluating from the shared professional values.
If you are looking for diverse candidates, your criteria may have to shift to assess candidates from different perspectives. For example, instead of assessing cultural fit from shared interests, consider evaluating their professional values. Rather than focusing on specific tiered schools or grades, consider keeping it to a certain educational level or equivalent amount of professional experience in a specific business function.
By shifting the interpretation of the assessment criteria itself, your recruitment team will be able to start evaluating diverse talents based on additional strengths they can bring to the table, rather than how similar they are to everyone else. This, in turn, will help with the number of applications that make it through the initial rounds of recruitment stages.
Related: Hire Like a Diversity Expert: 5 Key Qualities of Inclusive Employees
4. Interview to offer ratio
Are people from diverse backgrounds even being interviewed in the first place? If the answer is no, the first three areas in this blog can be useful to troubleshoot this. However, if diverse candidates are being interviewed but no offers are being extended, that might be a symptom of a deeper issue.
Consider recording the interviews for both training and transparency purposes. When you go back to the recordings, you will see things that stand out. Maybe a candidate may have been asked a question, even as an icebreaker, that wasn’t asked to other candidates. It could have been a different setting, or a candidate not being provided the accommodation that they requested.
This is going to help you to pinpoint possibly why some of these talents were not even able to get to the final offer stage and determine from the strategic level, where the problem could be coming from.
Related: Diversity and Inclusion Best Practices for Your Workforce
5. Career trajectory
Perhaps you have everything absolutely nailed down in terms of the strategic direction, sourcing strategies, a great interview-to-offer ratio and the candidates accepting the offer. However, retention or representation at the leadership levels could use more improvement. If this is the case, career trajectory should be examined.
This is a long-term strategy where you will need to collect over the years to examine the trend. For example, if entry-level employees are leaving the company for another company that gave them a higher-level role, this could mean that they did not see the opportunity for growth. While if a senior team member comes in as a new leader and they depart, it may be that they were not feeling set up for success.
Once you identify a clear pattern, go further into the records. What concerns did they bring up with their managers? Did anyone else who was managed by that manager experience a similar issue? Were there any indications? Use the data to better shape the career trajectory and experience.
