Creating more inclusive hiring practices: Monday matters #6
Making sure you have a diverse hiring panel is a great first step, but we need to go further if we’re really going to provide equal opportunities
Lots of practical guides have been written around how to reduce bias in your recruitment process, but we believe a more radical shift is needed. This week I want to tell a couple of stories about my first experience of being a hiring manager and my last experience of being a hiring manager to explore the problem with our recruitment practices and share what we’re doing differently with our Collaborative Future program.
My first recruitment process
I hired my first apprentice at the age of 21. Having been through my own challenges in finding a job without a university degree I jumped at the chance of being one of the managers involved in the 12-month apprenticeship program.
An external agency handled most of the recruitment process but the managers involved in the program were invited along for the final day of interviews. I vividly remember ten 18-21 year olds dressed in suits being marched into a large room with five managers and three HR representatives. They were made to sit around the table whilst we sat around the edge of the room with our score cards. I felt so uncomfortable about what was going to come next because I’d been here once before - I’d once been made to perform awkward tasks in a room full of 30 applicants in order to secure a Christmas sales assistant job at John Lewis.
The day ran from 10am until 4pm with the young people having to complete group tasks such as debating what they should take to a desert island, and then they waited while they were each interviewed by a panel of three staff members. I asked only asked two questions in the interviews I was a part of:
“What experience do you have with using spreadsheets?”
“What approach would you take to managing multiple deadlines?”.
A quiet 18 year old boy called Josh gave me succinct and straightforward answers to each, but he’d barely spoken in the group tasks and he struggled to engage with questions about unfamiliar work scenarios, what excited him about the company and where he saw himself being in 5 years time
The managers came together at the end of the day to discuss which five apprentices to hire out of the 10. Most of their choices were white and middle class, all of them were charismatic and confident - they were good “culture” fits. It was the first time I’d been involved in this kind of hiring so I was nervous when I spoke out against their choices. I voiced my desire to hire Josh - while he wasn’t confident or charismatic I knew he’d bring value to the team because he complimented the rest of us and he had potential to grow. Most of them looked concerned because he didn’t ‘tick all the boxes’ but I spoke with such passion that I think they felt they couldn’t argue with me. Josh became one of the best hires to our team and now works for the BBC.
My last recruitment process
The last role I hired for was a Chief Operating Officer. 7 years on from my experience with Josh I was now Director of People and had the power to make recruitment processes better and more inclusive. And this recruitment process was pivotal for the Diversity & Inclusion agenda my team and I had been pushing within the company. It was our first opportunity to address the lack of diversity in our all-white, mostly male, leadership team.
We decided to work with experts, BAME recruitment, to ensure we had a diverse pool of candidates from the start. We set clear competencies and scoring systems for the interviews and I tried to ensure we asked the same questions of each candidate (although the CEO had to be reminded of this in most of the interviews).
One thing that occurred during our scoring though was that our CEO gave substantially lower scores to the two black men we interviewed than I or my other colleague did. One of his explanations for this was that one of the candidates didn’t actually talk about any of HIS achievements “he just kept saying ‘we did this’ and ‘we did that’”. I challenged this view point but of course this is a deeply ingrained bias within white macho culture - to be seen as successful you must boast about your own personal accomplishments and take credit for all aspects of that success (although at the same time we all know only white men are allowed to get away with boasting within this set up). But it wouldn’t have even mattered if the interviewee had said ‘I’ instead of ‘we’ because at the end of the day our CEO wasn’t ready for diversity - he was perfectly happy surrounding himself with people who looked like him, shared similar experiences to him and thought like him. He said this explicitly to me once when I explained that diversity was important because we needed leaders that compliment one another - he retorted “Well if you don’t like my leadership style you can go find someone else to work for”.
He did in fact agree to hire a woman of colour in the end when the scoring eventually stacked up - but even though she’d aced the interview process he refused to give her a permanent job. He hired her on a 6 month interim contract partly to appease my team who had all been investing all of our energy into building a more diverse company. This whole facade made the situation both more challenging for the new recruit and also burnt me out to the point that I left before I had changed everything I wanted to change about the practices.
How can we do better?
Even as a passionate advocate for building diverse teams and creating equitable opportunities for people to access work it is a constant battle to make any meaningful change within existing recruitment practices. The systems were not designed with diverse candidates in mind - they were designed for a particular type of person to excel at.
Of course some companies create a decent amount of change within their recruitment processes by checking job descriptions for biased language, removing candidate names from CVs, ensuring diverse interview panels and providing interview training and structure to their hiring managers. But I believe we need to completely transform how we recruit in order to truly prioritise diversity and inclusion.
Our work placement program is an attempt at doing just that. Firstly, the process for applying to become an intern is light-touch - we don’t ask for CVs because people make all sorts of biased judgements about educational institutions, time spent working in any given job, formatting and design of the CV. Instead we ask young people to answer three basic questions, and we then run an informal interview where they are given the questions/topics they need to think about beforehand. We then match people with businesses and projects that are most suited to their existing skills and passions for their trial work placement (which they are paid living wage for to ensure that even if it doesn’t work out it doesn’t feel like wasted time for them). It is really at this stage where we and our partners get to learn more about someone’s strengths and potential.
Providing there is positive feedback from the first placement we’ll match them with up to three different businesses whilst they are on the program and provide them with coaching and training. We encourage our interns to continue to connect with other potential employers during their placement - providing them with flexibility to attend other interviews or to undertake other part-time work. And we also support them to safely explore the option of self-employment. Plus at the end of the placements we support the businesses to consider how they might employ an intern on a full-time, part-time, permanent or freelance basis (Our own website and social media has been designed by Sonia who participated as an intern in our pilot scheme and now works as a freelance marketer and designer).
And of course we’re not only optimising for diverse hiring. We’re also ensuring that the businesses who participate in the program are places diverse people want to continue working for. All too often businesses invest in hiring diverse people, only to have them leave 6 months down the line due to problems within the company culture. Alongside accessing our interns businesses on the program are given coaching and training too - providing a great opportunity for them to develop their management, leadership and communication skills and create a more inclusive organisation in which everyone is empowered to thrive.
Apply to become a Collaborative Future intern or find out more about participating in the scheme as a business.