Your Inclusive Hiring Questions Answered

Kerry Boys: Hello, and welcome to the leaders for good podcast. We know we’ve got a lot of new listeners out there. For those of you that aren’t familiar with us, we are leaders for good. We are a diversity equity, inclusion, and culture change specialist, and we’re all about unlocking the power of business to drive equity more broadly across the world.

Part of our focus is on impact. 50% of our profits go to equity driving causes, and you can learn more about that and how you can make a bigger impact through things like impact investing on our website. Now today we really want to talk to you about something that’s top of mind for many of our clients.

And we’re getting a lot of, a lot of questions on and doing lots of work in this space, which is given the talent shortage. How do we get our hiring processes working in the best possible way? How do we make sure that our hiring processes are inclusive? And how do we ensure that we are giving a fair and equitable go to people as part of that process?

So today we want to answer the key questions that we’re getting asked for our clients. And hopefully this will be really useful for you to be able to go and make some change in your organisation. Before we get started, we wanted to think about two really basic things. But what do we mean by inclusive hiring?

It’s one of those terms that’s banded around a lot, and we have a set perspective on that and then also why it matters and why it’s really important for both society and organisations. In terms of what we mean by inclusive hiring for us really that’s yes, of course, about bringing diversity into an organisation, but it actually goes beyond that.

In our dream world, when we’re getting inclusive hiring, right, it’s about four things. It’s about how do we ensure that we get the best talent for the. How do we ensure that we’ve got the right level of diversity in our organisation, and we’re unlocking that power of diversity and getting those different perspectives.

But also beyond that, how do we make sure that we’ve got the most efficient, possible process and how do we provide the best candidate experience? When we get inclusive hiring, right, it ticks all of those boxes.

Phil, I’ll hand over to you. Why does this matter? Why is it important for organisations and beyond.

Phil Cross: To help us think about why inclusive hiring matters, I’m going to use our ROI model or responsibility, opportunity, risk model as a way of thinking about that. So, first of all, the responsibility as always it’s the right thing to do there’s a sense in Australia of giving people a fair go, and we know that there’s lots of people out there who do not get a fair go.

There are underrepresented groups at all levels of organisational life and inclusive hiring goes a long way to address. In terms of the opportunity. The opportunity is huge for organisations from an increased talent pool, greater diversity of thought, leading to more innovation, more creativity. And ultimately pre-op creating a more inclusive culture where people feel connected, they feel engaged.

There are endless stats we could point to here as well. 63% improvement in employee engagement for inclusive company. And attracting talent from a broader candidate pool as well. 79% of CEOs are anticipating hardships in finding and retaining talent this year. So inclusive hiring when done right, gives you access to talent from a broader, broader pool.

And it’s important to job seekers as well, or people are increasingly looking the diversity of organisations that are increasingly looking at culture and looking for inclusive cultures. When they’re considering who they’re going to go and work for.

The final piece is the risk. First of all, is the harm done to individuals through discrimination? That’s the, that’s really the biggest risk of not getting this right, but of also of course, reputational and legal damage for organisations. If you have discriminatory practices in your hiring, you could be one of the 2037 workplace discrimination complaints, which were received by the Australian human rights commission last year.

Kerry Boys: And I think that’s really interesting, right? Because I think so much at the moment there’s discrimination that we don’t even realize in our hiring processes. There was a case in the last four weeks where someone was discriminated against and wasn’t hired because they were in their seventies.

And that has come through as a discrimination case. Where we might sometimes consider the age is a factor that we believed. Important in terms of someone’s capability to deliver a role that can often be a bias and that can get all the way through to legal cases and discrimination. We need to be really careful when we’re thinking about how our processes.

Phil Cross: Absolutely. Diving into the questions and diving into what we’re hearing from our clients. When we start this process where do we start? is the first question. It can seem overwhelming for organisations that haven’t done any work on their hiring process from an inclusion perspective.

So Kerry, where do we start? What’s first?

Kerry Boys: I guess the me. Start somewhere would be the first thing that I’d say. And I’ll talk now about our sort of process and approach that we go through and how we think about this. But the reality is there are lots of little things you can do, and then there is a bigger strategic approach.

So I’ll let Phil in a minute talk about some of those quick wins and the smaller things we can do. But if we wanted to think holistically, if we were going to take a best-in-class approach to this, we’d really recommend looking at three areas. The first one is strategy. And for us that covers off, why is inclusive hiring important for an organisation? How does it link to your business strategy? How does it link to your goals and ensuring we can put a really strong business case together so that we can get everyone on board around that.

The next part of that then is understanding current. What does diversity look like at the moment within the organisation? Where do we have gaps? Where are we underrepresented? And what changes, why might we need to think about making to enable that once we understand current state, we can then set some goals. So what are our areas of underrepresentation and what are we looking for?

A big sort of factor here we often find is that organisations will focus on one group. In Australia, it’s very common to start thinking about women. It’s an area to set targets. And from our perspective, that’s absolutely fine. It starts somewhere, but where possible, and over time as organisational maturity grows, we can start to look at a really broad range of organisational groups and make sure we’ve really got that diversity.

Once you’ve got some targets, it’s about thinking about a really clear plan of action and a roadmap. So, strategy is number one, next step is process.

Let’s think about what our process looks like. We do a lot of work in process mapping. So again, let’s understand current state let’s understand our existing process and what are the points at which there’s potential for things like bias to creep in.

But also, as we talked about earlier, we think there’s a bigger opportunity here. So not only things like bias, but also where are the inefficiencies in our process. What does a candidate experience look like through our process and how can we use this to completely re-engineer our process to be beneficial on all fronts.

Once we’ve got that, then it’s about thinking about interventions. What things might we need to change and our approach to that really, because you’re going to get a whole list of things that you can change when we go through this process. Our clients end up often sometimes with 50 plus things that they’d ideally want to change.

So the next stage is about prioritisation. Where do we focus and how do we identify which of those are the highest impact, but also lowest effort. And let’s start there. Let’s get really clear on a roadmap for making that change and making sure we involve people in the right way. Of course, given this is a change management piece and then final thing we always recommend considering as part of that process focus is technology. So there’s lots of tech out there, organisations like Be Applied that really allow you to take a scientific and data-based approach to hiring. So definitely check those out.

And then the final area to think about is people, your people and their capability building. What training do we need to provide? Inclusive hiring training where we deep dive into bias is so important. There’s of course systemic bias, which sort of looks at when you’re, you’re thinking about your process, but also that bias that we all have and part of the human condition at an individual level. So how do we help our hiring managers start to understand that? Start to overcome that. And then the other part of that is of course this is change, so we have to take our people on the journey. How do we communicate to them? Why this is important? How do we help them to understand what they need to do in that process and why it matters? So three things to think about strategy, process and your people and capability, and really you can, all of those are entry points. You can start any of those, any of those areas.

Okay. So that’s how you can think about it from sort of bigger picture strategic perspective. The other question we really often get asked is we’re really busy. We’re really time poor. We want to make some change quickly. What are some quick things that we can do?

What are some, what are some easy wins? So I’ll let you answer that Phill, what are some quick changes people can make in that process?

Phil Cross: Thanks. I think an important thing to note here as well, these can often be done concurrently while we are building a strategy while we’re looking at the bigger picture and our approach. There are some of these that don’t necessarily require the same level of connection that they’re pretty much going to be universal across the process. Just to watch out that we still want to bring people along for the change. So, still communicating why we’re doing this and why we’re making the changes. That’s a piece that still needs to happen. On top of these being quick wins.

So when we think about the quick wins, we can, again, look at the. We can look across the whole process and life cycle of recruitment from job design to attraction, to selection of candidates, to onboarding ultimately. And what I’ll do now is I’ll just share a maybe one from the first three.

Then that will give you an idea of some of the things that you can, you can go away and you can, you can put into action right now. So when we’re considering job design, Thinking about flexibility upfront is really important. So what are the must-haves and what are the nice-to-haves for this role?

And how can we design this role to be to be as suitable and as attractive as we can to as broad a spectrum of individuals as we can. So when we are considering job design, Are we doing what we’ve always done from a job design perspective? Or are we, or are we looking at it from you know, more from a, from a ground up perspective and thinking about what could this role look like as opposed to what it’s always looked like.

And he builds on that one. Kerry, I know you’ve got a lot of thoughts around job design. Do you

Kerry Boys: have a lot of thoughts around job design now? I think I just build on. The flexibility. Yes, absolutely. And you mentioned it briefly there, but this must have versus nice to haves. So one of the things we see with clients so often in job descriptions is you end up with a long, long, long list of criteria.

So for this role, you must have these skills or for this role, we’re looking for X, Y, Z. And actually, we see that’s really off-putting to many groups. So we know that men will apply for jobs. If they meet 60. Of the list of requirements, whereas women will only apply if they meet a hundred percent. So if we’re looking for example, to recruit more women, we’re really better off to simplify that list.

Be very clear on what are our must haves, what are the things we really need for this role? So let’s take a project management role. Do we really need someone to have had a project management degree or actually does 10 years of experience in project management represent a better indication of what they might be capable of and the experience that they’ve had?

Being really clear on what is absolutely required for the role can make a huge difference in terms of the diversity of applications that you receive.

Phil Cross: The next quick win, I think is in terms of attraction and being really upfront about the benefits and, and, and really the, I guess the elements of organisational culture that are really going to matter to a, to a broad spectrum of candidates.

So is flexible working something that’s core to your organisation and that’s available to everybody. Are you know an advanced or progressive parental leave policy, part of part of the package, all of these things that really matter to candidates and candidates are looking at more and more, especially in light of the great re-evaluation that we’ve gone through.

And so many people looking for new and potentially more meaningful and more satisfying work, that suite of benefits, isn’t just pool tables and kombucha. This is meaningful for people’s quality of life. Also these are going to be necessities for a lot of people. If we think about parents and caregivers, if we think about people with different types of neuro-diversity that might require a different kind of work. These are all super important to be clear about upfront and not left to discovery once people get through the job application process a bit further because people might not apply in the first place if they don’t know that they’re there.

Something really simple, but really powerful, you can go away and do immediately if you’re not already doing so is to use a tool to review things like your job ads from a gender perspective. So we know that certain words, certain terminology is going to be off-putting to certain individuals and more attractive to others. And a tool like the gender decoder, and we’ll put a link to this in the show notes, can give you a really objective steer based in evidence on whether your job ads likely to be more attractive to men, more attractive to women, and you can tweak and augment your language accordingly. So a really easy, quick win that.

Kerry Boys: And I’ll just add if it’s okay. Like the type of language that sometimes it’s really common in job ads, but can actually be very off-putting is things like aggressive targets, or we need someone that’s going to drive the team or leader determined resource plans, that we might not realize that that language can be, can be off-putting, but actually can have a huge impact.

Phil Cross: Absolutely, absolutely. And the final area that we’re going to that we’re going to touch on in terms of quick wins is candidate selection. A really simple thing you can do here, and again, there are many that you can dive into. It’s just ensuring that there’s diversity in your candidate review panels. So is that, is all your candidate review panels reflective of the diversity in your organisation? Are they representing the people who are applying for the roles? Or are you putting a relatively at least visually homogenous group in front of potential candidates? So some things to consider there.

So those are some quick wins. Now I’m going to throw a question over to Kerry, because I know she’s very passionate about this one. What is the role of targets in hiring? How do we think about that? Would we not just recruit the best person for the job? Is it not about meritocracy? How are we thinking about it?

Kerry Boys: I love this question, and there’s so much that we can go into here and I’ll talk for a bit and then Phil, I know you’ll probably want to jump in as well. I think meritocracy is a really important area to discuss and we get a lot in organisations and yes, absolutely meritocracy is ideal, but the reality is meritocracy is a myth at the moment because we have so much bias in our processes. So even though we like to think that we’re judging purely based on merit, the reality shows the complete opposite. And that’s none of our faults, that’s who we are as humans. We talk about this a lot, but bias is part of the human condition. It doesn’t make us bad people. It’s just natural. It’s part of how we make sense of the world, but it does mean that meritocracy is is not a reality at the moment. And that’s why we believe in things like quotas and targets. And we’ve seen the impact that they have on organisations in terms of changing hiring decisions. And it’s for a number of reasons. And I think the most basic one is just, it makes us question our decisions. It makes us think twice about the candidates that we’re hiring, which is great because that’s one of the ways we start to overcome bias.

The other thing, is the research. And you’ll notice, we come back to research a lot, but all of the research on quotas shows that quotas don’t result in under-qualified people getting roles. They prevent under-qualified original candidates getting roles. So what I mean by that is let’s take it from gender perspective.

So gender quota doesn’t mean under-qualified women get roles . It means that underqualified men don’t. So it prevents under-qualified men being promoted rather than resulting in an under-qualified women getting promoted.

Phil Cross: Yeah. So, so important. And again, it’s a question that we keep coming back to time and time again, and we’ve never had an organisation that we’ve worked with that has implemented targets come back and regret it. I think the proof of the pudding is in the eating. And, and we see time and time again, it just, it, it just results in better outcomes for organisations. So we would, we would encourage you if you’re sceptical to lean into that one.

Kerry Boys: And we’d really love to hear your thoughts on that and how target setting has gone for you as an organisation that we worked with recently, that’s a tech organisation and upon implementing targets, some of these quick wins and also taking a strategic approach, we were able to take their hiring into their tech teams from about 20% of candidates being female, up to 40% of candidates being female within five months.

So, we can make real changes very quickly. When we start to think about all of these different areas and we really raise the level of consciousness around making these decisions.

Phil Cross: Follow-up question to that in terms of implementing this effectively and organisations, and this is something we get asked a lot, who do we need to involve? Who needs to be part of this process? Obviously, HR and hiring managers, but anybody else?

Kerry Boys: Yeah, it’s so important, and really this is part of broader culture work. And what that means is we need levels of involvement and communication all through the organisation. We need senior management to be on board. We need senior management to understand and share why this matters. We need them to reinforce targets. We need them to help us build this into people’s KPIs, but we also need hiring managers and the broader organisation. Hiring managers need to understand why this is happening. They need to understand their role.

We need to support them. The best in class organisations that we work with, we often have monthly hiring meetings with our hiring managers, and that’s a few things it’s reinforcing targets reminding on the why it’s also sharing how we’re doing on a monthly basis, as well as asking them what more they need from us.

And often the best ideas come from hiring managers. One of the hiring managers we work with recently talked about the potential of a strategic partnership that he’d seen in that specific industry. And by working with that strategic partner, we opened up a whole new talent pool. So hiring managers, and then the other is just the organisation more broadly.

We need to create inclusive cultures, if we’re talking that, so it’s not just the recruitment process, but how does that flow through to culture? So how are we making sure that our culture as a whole is inclusive? Are we making sure that everyone understands the basics of diversity and inclusion and training on all of those elements?

Okay. One final question then. Where have we seen organisations go wrong with this and what can organisations do to be pre-emptive about that?

Phil Cross: First one, and I guess possibly the biggest, although that’s debatable. Is getting inclusive behaviours and getting inclusion as part of the culture right. So if we’re, if we’re taking an organisation that’s been relatively homogenous for a while, that’s not had a lot of change and not had a lot of diversity in the workforce. And you bring in a ton of diversity, all of a sudden that can cause more trouble than it solves. And, can actually cause a quite disrupted and quite fragmented culture.

So if we are going to add a lot of diversity to an organisation, we also need to make sure we get inclusion, right. And that can happen in a number of different ways, depending on the organisation and the culture and where people are at. But it’s, there’s a reason that, you know, this is diversity and inclusion work.

Kerry Boys: Yeah, perfect. And I’ll just add one, which is probably a more, well, theoretically more tactical one, but also does really flow through, which is the use of the term culture fit. So, so often in organisations, we talk about culture fit and that really just plays into bias because it means we look for people that look and sound like us already. So if we want diversity, what we recommend thinking about instead is culture add. So what are we looking for in terms of culture add? And that can really make a huge difference to how we think about the hiring process. So that would definitely be a big one for me.

Phil Cross: A final one from me. And this is sort of taking a step back and really getting buy-in all levels of the organisation. But especially at senior management levels. Is the wanting things to be different from the way they are or wanting new perspectives, new ways of doing things. Because if we are bringing in diversity of thought and diversity of perspective, that presupposes that we want our current ways of working to be challenged and that we might want to change them.

Embarking on this project is not just about bringing those people into the organisation. It’s about letting them shape the organisation as well and bringing their wisdom to it. So if that is not desirable for you, then that’s a big, big question for you in terms of embarking on an inclusive hiring thing, because it is a fundamental culture shift if we’re doing this properly.

Kerry Boys: Yeah, great point. And hopefully, this session has been really useful to you, and hopefully, there’s a balance between some big things to think about that might take longer and be a bit more challenging and the culture shift Phil just mentioned. As well as some really tactical quick wins that you can take away and implement immediately.

And if you need any help, of course, we’re there to do that. We run assessments on your recruitment process to understand how inclusive they are. We also look at hiring manager training as well as things like strategy and consulting. Feel free to get in touch and we’re more than happy to have a conversation about how we can help.

Phil Cross: And let us know what other areas of diversity, equity, and inclusion you’d like your questions answered on as well. If you have follow-up questions to this, or you’d like another area deep-dived into let us know, send us an email at [email protected].

Kerry Boys: Thank you for joining us.