As an HR Manager with roughly six years of experience in hiring and recruitment, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting a variety of people from all walks of life. I keep the stories of these candidates, sometimes later co-workers and sometimes later friends, with me—a temporary placement who made an impact so strongly that we hired her full-time; a connection I met through my tattoo artist’s Instagram story who just needed someone to give them a chance in the office world; a single mother of three who didn’t have the best availability, but needed to make a home for her family. There are too many to recount.
If you asked me how many of those candidates perfectly met all criteria for the roles they applied for, I can guarantee that if the decision was made purely off that, more than half of them probably wouldn’t have made it through the initial pass. Sure, they met some of the qualifications and had experience in most of the duties—there were even other candidates that, on paper, met the requirements to a T. When you base your recruitment strategy around equity and inclusion, finding the right candidate for the job is so much more than that. Approaching recruitment in this way is something to be celebrated, and not feared.
The Unicorn Doesn’t Exist
Most of us in the business world are trying to hire humans (you are excused, casting directors for professional animal actors), right? If there’s one thing I can say with certainty about every candidate I’ve spoken with over the years, it is that they were human beings, and human beings are imperfect. Perfection is not something to strive for, because as many of us know it is not an attainable goal, and it shouldn’t be a framework for setting expectations. The funny thing about the nonprofit and business world is that, for many of us, somewhere along the line we forget this truth. In subtle and unconscious ways, we’ve led ourselves down a path of one-size-fits-all approaches, homogenous staffing, and unchangeable thinking. Why do we often hold our candidates to unrealistic expectations when it comes to finding the “right fit?”
Often referred to as “looking for a unicorn,” many of us develop tunnel vision when looking for candidates. If they don’t meet all the requirements or have experience in all job duties, they go right into the rejection pile. The “unicorn” represents the idea of finding that needle in a haystack— that one, perfect candidate that meets every requirement, that can come in and “hit the ground running” on all facets of the role.
What an easy job we would have if every accountant, every teacher, every manager received the exact same guidebook to success, with the same education, and same access to resources to continue their learning. Yet this is not the reality. Some of the strongest candidates I’ve worked with or hired have brought a wealth of experience via their transferrable skills and lived experiences, even if they didn’t have a few qualifications, because they were eager to grow and develop themselves. Personally, I went to school for communications, and came from a background of food service, customer service, and direct patient support in healthcare prior to my first role in HR. My customer-service orientation, ability to manage time and prioritize (and re-prioritize) in a fast-paced environment, and my communication skills have all been integral to finding my role at TSNE. I consider myself one of the lucky ones, as for many workers, there are significant other barriers in their pipeline.
Equity in Action: Eliminating Barriers to Success
Workers across the globe have wildly differing experiences when it comes to finding a job in their chosen career, or even just a job that pays the bills until they can get into their career path of choice. Some workers don’t have a choice at all, depending on their lived experiences and opportunities available to them in their situation. Various factors and systemic barriers from access to resources, economic class, regional cost of living, physical and mental health, and other disparities all play a part in determining what options are available for workers across all fields. These disparities do not mean that a particular candidate can’t or isn’t trying to develop skills and experience in the workforce. What they do mean is that candidates that experience one or more of these challenges will have a much harder time developing those skills and experience. In developing a recruitment process rooted in equity and inclusion, one question your organization can begin by asking is: how can we reduce or eliminate these barriers?
First things first—let’s look at those job descriptions. Research shows that specific language used in a job description may limit your candidate pool by exclusion. For example, certain word choices like “competitive” or “determined” have been shown to come across as masculine language, which can result in women, nonbinary, or other gender diverse candidates feeling less compelled to apply for consideration for concerns they would not belong in the work culture (and vice versa, words like “collaborative” or “cooperative” appearing more feminine). Try reading through your job descriptions and working to replace adjectives like these with more neutral language.
Another consideration is how your organization thinks about education requirements. Certain requirements, such as a lawyer needing to be bar-certified and possess a Juris Doctor degree, are required for federal and state compliance, but what if your role is not beholden to those regulations? Studies show that more and more organizations are moving away from this in efforts to increase candidate pools through skills-first hiring: in January 2024, 52% of U.S. based job postings on Indeed did not include a formal education requirement, which is an increase compared to 48% at the same time in 2019. The 2022 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics population survey showed that 68% of Asian Americans ages 25 and older held bachelor’s degrees, followed by 44% of white Americans. Comparatively, statistics show 34% of Black Americans, and 25% of Latinx Americans over the age of 25 held bachelor’s degrees. If you require degrees for positions that have no mandatory requirements for such, this will create significant barriers for qualified candidates to apply and decrease both the size and diversity of your candidate pool. What steps can your organization take to consider candidates with equivalent experience, or some experience and a desire to grow?
There are many ways to mitigate these barriers. At the end of the day, it’s important to develop an understanding of why it is important for your organization. By removing barriers for candidates who would otherwise not apply, or that you may not consider, for your positions, you are making a commitment to celebrating diversity in all ways. Consider what value the candidates you’re missing could bring to your team, and what other factors might be playing into your decision, consciously or unconsciously.
The Thin Line Between Bias and Belonging
You want to like your colleagues—you want to be able to share experiences with them, find commonalities, and create a culture of belonging. This might look like hiring candidates who have a similar thinking process or communication style as you, or who went to the same school, or who like the same recreational activities. But selecting candidates purely on “the vibe” can be a slippery slope, one that can lead to unconscious bias and undermine your organization’s success and reputation. Here are a few helpful starting points to incorporate into your hiring process:
- Skills-First: Implement standardized interview questions and evaluation criteria, focusing on candidates’ relevant skills and experience. This helps to equitably assess each candidate’s abilities against the requirements for the role and helps reduce affinity bias.
- Diversify Interviews: Ensure diverse representation on your hiring panels, including individuals from various backgrounds, identities, tenure, gender, and identity. Candidates typically feel more comfortable and welcomed when they know they are working with others that look like them, particularly candidates belonging to historically and systemically excluded identities.
- Avoid Assumption: Challenge stereotypes actively and assess candidates on their individual merits and job-related competencies. If you find yourself making an assumption about a candidate due to a stereotype or lived experience you have, try to stop yourself and ask why you feel that way.
- Humans Before Process: Provide options for accommodations during the interview process (i.e., virtual interviews, closed captioning, sharing questions ahead of time, accessible physical locations), without making assumptions about a candidate’s ability.
- Remote, Remote, Remote: Use remote interviewing techniques and consider making positions remote, if possible, to expand your reach. Even if a position must be onsite, having the option to hold your interviews virtually can help reduce barriers for candidates that may not be able to leave their current job to interview onsite with you.
Allowing ourselves to acknowledge that everyone has unconscious bias sometime in our lives is the first step to challenging these biases. Opening your mind to engaging with and lifting up people who see things differently than you do gets easier the more you practice this behavior. Not only that, but you may find yourself surprised by the new and innovative ideas your staff bring to the team when your process, from the beginning, has demonstrated to them that their individual perspectives are wanted and needed.
Conclusion
There is no one approach that will work for every candidate, every human, all the time, but incorporating equity and inclusion into hiring and recruitment encourages a culture of continuous learning and growth. In today’s dynamic and diverse workforce, having a recruitment strategy that centers humans and prioritizes diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging is not just a nice-to-have; it’s essential and a strategic advantage. Organizations that not only embrace these values in their hiring processes, but demonstrate their commitment to these values, cultivate a more inclusive environment while unlocking numerous benefits that can lead to long-term success for the organization and its staff. By embedding these values into your recruitment process as a hiring manager or people leader, you can enhance your workplace culture, improve staff and client retention, and position your organization as a leader in the sector.
At TSNE, we actively implement equity-focused recruitment strategies including anonymous interviews, diverse interview panels, staff diversity goals, annual unconscious bias training for all staff, and in-house resources for hiring teams. Please feel free to check out these resources and incorporate into your organization’s practices as desired:
- Interview Process Guide – Best practices for an equitable interview and hiring process
- Anonymous Interview Process Guide – Provides a framework for implementing an anonymous interview process with an equity lens
- Examples of Systemic Barriers Document – Provides examples of systemic barriers that affect candidates from marginalized and underrepresented groups during a hiring process and how to mitigate them