We recently came together with business leaders across APAC as part of our DEI APAC Roundtable series. Four key strategies that can be leveraged to optimise the effectiveness of hiring for diverse candidates were discussed and are outlined below.
Diverse Sourcing
- There are huge benefits to employing both short & long-term talent acquisition strategies.
- If you are hiring the majority of your talent for the ‘now’, you are too late.
- In lieu of effective channels to source candidates, could you look to developing your internal talent?
- Some industries struggle more so than others when trying to build the pipeline of talent as their industry evolves so rapidly i.e. the tech sector.
- An effective means to attracting talent is through industry bodies & partnerships.
- How is your marketing team shaping your brand’s public perception? Why would diverse candidates want to work for your brand?
Hiring without bias
- There are 4 main unconscious biases
- Affinity bias – interviewers feeling “I like the interviewee”.
- Halo bias – people associated with positive branded organisations / education.
- Performance evaluation bias – how interviewers have bias and evaluate men on potential, women on past achievements.
- Performance attribution bias – where the interviewees themselves tend, if women, to talk about their successes as reliant on external factors “my company helped me with this”; whereas some men might say “I did this” and own an achievement, sometimes more than is accurate.
- Don’t always assume that working for a particular type of company means not being successful in another company (e.g. you work for a big company, you won’t be a success in our faster-moving, agile company).
Integrating with other business units
- If there were one ‘silver bullet’ to what makes DEI initiatives most successful, it’s leadership buy-in & integration throughout the business.
- Quotas can be a double-edged sword whereby the “diversity” candidate/employee is perceived by others not to be there on merit. Also, the diverse employee may feel like they secured the role because of meeting a quota.
- Quotas can be effective when used as a trigger that is linked to business unit KPI’s – this has proven to be more effective than doing nothing at all.
- Sponsorship is a key strategy for the advancement of diverse talent. Do your emerging leaders have visibility of & access to your senior leadership team from various functions? One example that was shared was of 1 CEO who meets regularly with the top 5 future candidates to nurture their development.
Candidate nurturing
- Could you improve your candidate nurturing experience? Think long-term in your candidate experience.
- How can you set up an ecosystem that creates a positive experience not necessarily for now, but for 6, 12 or even 24 months into the future?
Our DEI Roundtable sessions unite business leaders to discuss challenges, wins & share knowledge amongst the global DEI community as a means of accelerating change.
