Diversity Hires

I once had an HR professional at a company where we were exploring a partnership ask me whether I thought she ought to recruit “a black woman” for a newly open management role. I was a bit taken aback by the prompt. I said that it was ultimately up to the leadership of the company as to whom they wanted to target, and that I personally would choose the most excellent person in a broad pool of qualified candidates.

It’s rare when someone asks such a pointed question about hiring for a diverse workplace. It feels wrong to pre-designate a role for a gender and a race, like a one slot quota system with arbitrary preferences. (I honestly don’t know how the person came up with “black” and “woman” for the open job in question.) It’s also a poor method of recruiting the best people for a position. What if you only find one qualified person who fits your demographic criteria? Do you automatically hire that person? (In this particular example, I’m afraid the answer might have been yes.)

What’s a better way? A similar question has been asked in the National Football League (NFL), which grapples perennially with a low ratio of non-white coaches, especially non-white head coaches. Their remedy is the “Rooney Rule,” which prompts NFL teams to interview minority candidates for all top brass jobs. And though the “rule” has no teeth and seems to be frequently ignored in that particular setting, it’s a useful rule of thumb for recruiting for businesses.

Unlike in the NFL, where only 32 head coaching jobs exist for a very peculiar set of skills and experiences, the vast majority of open roles at companies require commodity skills and commonly held experiences. A good recruiter will therefore search far and wide for many people who fit the bona fide skills and experiences requested by the hiring manager for the role. They’ll also have an eye out for cultural fit along such bona fide dimensions as “growth mindset” for a company that places a high premium on that quality. For companies that value diversity, they’ll also make sure to assemble a highly qualified pool of candidates that includes a broad array of demographic traits.

Not every company values diversity. That’s because not every leader values diversity. Some, like the HR professional who prompted me, really do mean well but struggle to implement hiring practices that create richly diverse teams. It’s not easy to recruit a team comprised of different demographic moorings, and diverse teams must be managed on that dimension in addition to all the others in order to be effective. But we believe diverse teams are worth the extra recruitment and management effort required. Why? Because if leadership gets it right, diverse teams simply perform better.