Just fucking do it. Recruiting for diversity 101

It’s not about me

A big problem when confronting diversity and inclusion is that it always seems to be somebody else’s issue.

We tell ourselves that we personally do enough. That we don’t discriminate. That we are welcoming and inclusive to people from all backgrounds. That the person they are talking about in the news is always somebody else, it’s not me.

2017 has seen a surfacing of the iceberg of revelations about sexual harassment and discrimination. Particularly in tech, but now more broadly across other industries too. And it really is an iceberg. One that has periodically broached the surface over the last few years, but is now rolling belly up to expose a mass of disturbing issues that are finally, seeing the sun.

Clearly, this self-narrative that we’re “doing enough” is wrong.

As wave after wave of news hit, a personal realization this year has been that it’s not about me. That me feeling like I do enough is irrelevant when it’s you who are the one that feels discriminated against. I knew I had to do more, but I wasn’t sure where to start.

It’s with this mindset I found myself fortunate to be in the audience and listening to the very dynamic Annie Parker (CEO at Fishburners in Sydney), talk at the QuT Creative3 conference in Brisbane on Diversity and Inclusion.

Annie spoke passionately about diversity and inclusion and pointed out it takes “every single one of us doing what we can to fix it.” Mentoring is not enough, public programs and one time initiatives aren’t going to impact real, long term change.

She gave a lot of specific examples of actions we could take, but one in particular resonated as we’d just started recruiting for a sales role. “Do you brief your recruiters on specifically asking for diversity in candidates?”

Annie immediately raised the point that she herself struggles with the idea of mandatory quotas. When recruiting for small startups, it really is about the right fit. Instead of forcing a quota, which can rightly or wrongly derail the conversation, she suggested we tackle the problem by continuing to recruit the best available — but insist that the pool is diverse.

This was an idea I was immediately able to get behind.

I’d been reading the findings in the Uber Eric Holder report and the recommendation there for “Blind CV’s” (reviewing a CV with all identifying information removed, particularly names and photos) and the “Rooney Rule” (enforcing diversity in the pool of candidates), which is essentially what Annie was proposing.

Annie’s call to action was a kick in the arse that it was more than time to step up and do something here, especially as we were starting the recruiting process for a sales role at Zeen.

Taking action

By the time Annie sat back down, I’d bashed out an email to our recruiter, Neil Warlicht from Stepping Stone that said in part:

Just watched an awesome talk that really challenged me to do better here.

Obviously we want the right candidate, but I want to challenge ourselves to get to 50% female applicants in the pool.

Also I want to review CVs blind — so if at least for the initial screening, please keep the photos and names to yourself until I review and select them. Keen to try this and make sure I keep my biases in check.

Neil proved to be a willing partner in this and I shortly received the following answer:

Thanks and I really like this approach. I’ve actually never done it but I do think it makes a lot of sense and helps taking out the bias.

And with that, we were on the road to a positive change.

The review process

Initially it was confronting to receive resumes with only initials like “JW” or “SI” listed at the top. It shouldn’t have been.

Hand-on-heart I believe I’ve never consciously biased against someone based on their name. Still, the fact that an absent name makes me feel like I’m “missing” something suggests that, at least unconsciously, I was drawing info from that. There were other lessons in the process as well.

While not fully quantifiable (because I didn’t keep accurate stats), I could identify a female resume most of the time. Simply put, I’d end up thinking “this person is female” and when I got to the phone screen, I’d be correct.

I went back through the resumes submitted to try understand what it was about female candidates that stood out. I concluded it’s a combination of two reasons:

1. The language that people use to describe themselves.
2. The work history.

Female candidates included words that described how they would fit into a team.

The female resumes submitted were much more likely to include terms like “calm presence and cheerful demeanor”, “self motivated and charismatic”, “enthusiastic” and “down to earth”. Male candidates would use more phrases like “talented and ambitious”, “results driven and successful” and in one case “Time Magazine’s Person of the Year 2006”. Yes, each of these quotes is pulled from an actual resume I reviewed.

Generally speaking, the female candidates included words that described how they would fit into a team and spoke less about themselves using the same bold and forthright terms as the males.

Female resumes often appeared more honest about their work history.

When it came to work history, a couple of other things stood out. One is that female resumes often appeared more honest about their work history. Every male candidate started their career as an Account Manager at a minimum. The second related factor was that female candidates went deeper into their work history; when recruiting you for a senior sales role, you probably don’t need to tell me that you started as a receptionist.

While the blind CV’s didn’t fully disguise gender, they did do an excellent job in masking racial diversity and for this alone, they are a powerful tool.

Reviewing AS instead of Aanhya Suri or JG instead of Jose Gonzales is a simple way to reduce unconscious bias. To an earlier point — believing I don’t have these biases is irrelevant; that’s what unconscious means! I have nothing to lose and everything to gain by making this one simple change.

On every objective level, names and pictures are completely irrelevant to finding the best and I’ll insist they are removed in the future too. Even where an identity may be important (for example reviewing samples of your social media work) it can still be anonymized or a detailed review safely left to a future screening step.

So what about the pool?

It’s harder to assess the impact of the pool. Despite good intentions, we only hit about a 40:60 split of females to males. There’s reasons why, but I’d like to have done better here.

Looking at the actual onsite face-to-face interviews of candidates we ended up with the following:

• 3 females (1 African American, 1 Hispanic, 1 Caucasian)
• 5 males (1 African American, 1 Hispanic, 3 Caucasian)

This is more people than we’d normally interview for our final round, but our first selection didn’t accept our offer and we had to go out to market again.

While it’s hard to objectively say how different the pool was from other recruitment rounds we’ve done, I definitely felt that by concentrating on diversity in the pool, we were forced to cast our net wider than we might otherwise have done. Towards the end, it was becoming more challenging to find a good balance of candidates. In the past, we would have defaulted to filling out the pool with the dominant candidate type (which for this sales role was definitely white males).

So it’s a challenge, but once you have the pool, there are very real benefits.

I’m as prone as anyone to the old sawhorse that we’re all about “A-Team” players. It’s tempting to position recruiting the best-of-the-best as a binary proposition. Person A is better than Person B, no more decision needed. But it’s also never that simple. Every hiring team has had a discussion that goes something like this:

“Candidate A has more direct experience, but Candidate B brings more energy and other skills to the role.”

A pool helps ensure that we bring a full range of candidates to the table, turning those binary decisions into a multi-faceted choice. We can continue to debate the benefits or otherwise of recruiting to an enforced quota, but while we’re doing that, there shouldn’t be too many objections to building a diverse pool.

Recruiter’s Perspective

It definitely helped us that Neil was willing to run this process for us, so I thought I’d reach out to him for his perspective on how they went filling the pool and removing the identifying features on the resumes.

When discussing recruitment and hiring, a good number of our clients mention diversity as being a priority. That said, the reality is that companies have difficulty establishing effective recruitment processes that contribute to diversity.

When Tim floated the idea of introducing candidates using blind CVs, we were extremely excited and immediately ran with it. We expanded our reach to a wider range of candidates, not only in terms of gender and ethnicity, but career paths and skill sets as well.

Removing the identifying information was only a small change to our process, but ensuring the pool was more diverse did take additional effort in the screening process. We reached out to almost twice as many candidates as we would for similar roles and spent more time speaking to and debriefing candidates.

Interestingly enough, initial response rates from candidates were higher compared to similar roles worked on in the past. Ultimately, we felt it worthwhile and the pool we put forward was both diverse and representative of the best available talent on the market. We’ll definitely be recommending this approach to future clients.

— Neil Warlicht, Stepping Stone

It’s great to have a partner in the recruiting process that can support you in this, but even if we recruit directly in the future, we’ll still follow a similar process (by getting someone who is not involved in the actual recruiting to sanitize the inbound resumes).

Food for thought for candidates

I can’t make the world fair, although I am trying to make my little corner of it fairer. Regardless, candidates should consider that it’s rarely a level playing field.

I don’t make any claim that using language to describe yourself as “a caring team player” is good or bad, but I’ve seen an observable difference in language between how males and females describe themselves. Be aware that the difference can exist and choose your language knowingly; own how you want to portray yourself.

For all candidates, I recommend that you pare your resume back to the most recent, relevant work experience. You don’t need to lie, but don’t be afraid to showcase your earliest roles in the briefest, most positive light or potentially not even mention them at all.

Final thoughts

There’s been unexpected benefits in the process. Beyond the fact we’re happy with our recruiting outcome, being open internally about why we’re doing it this way is signaling that it’s OK to care about diversity and inclusion and more importantly, to take action on it.

I’m far from perfect and while I try not to intentionally bias, unconsciously it happens. By publicly recognizing this, it’s given team members more license to call me out when they see something that I’m missing. I’m grateful when they do and we’ve avoided some small missteps that, while they may not have mattered in themselves, could collectively send the wrong signals.

I’d love to hear about your experiences with making changes towards diversity and inclusion. Blind CV’s and a diverse pool are one small step that anyone, no matter what size startup or company, can take to improve outcomes.

Ultimately I’m still being inspired by Annie here — another of her call to actions was “Do you share what works well across your industry with others?”. This is a start.

It’s more than time we stepped up and started to just fucking do it. It’s diversity and inclusion 101 but it’s a beginning. I hope you’ll join me.

Thanks to Annie Parker, Neil Warlicht and Ches Wajda for their review of the draft.