How to create a pipeline for a diverse work force

Founder and chief executive officer of digital strategy firm Red Dot Digital and business matchmaking platform B2beematch

Diversity in hiring continues to be a challenge for most companies today. But when recruiters think about diversity only at the moment of hiring, they’re often too late to create the conditions that would make that objective more possible.

In my conversations with people at every level in the business world, I often hear two troubling messages on the topic. First, “Well, we don’t know how to hire diverse people because we don’t know where to find them,” and second, “We don’t want to set up diverse hires for failure. We don’t want to hire against diversity quotas if they won’t succeed.”

These messages indicate a few problems: bad planning, blind spots and a lack of understanding of what diversity is and how to manage it. These arrive in chronological order in a candidate’s life, and they can be resolved if companies are pro-active.

The bad-planning issue is the most straightforward one to address: It’s about creating a longterm hiring pipeline of diverse candidates. Right now, many companies are trying to hire for diversity at entry-level job levels. Many such candidates have already been rerouted to vocational courses or the trades rather than studying for high-skilled professions, or they’ve dropped out because they’ve been belittled throughout their schooling.

The practice of streaming – encouraging some kids into applied instead of academic courses in high school – has been widely decried for disproportionately targeting Black and racialized kids, and change is beginning to happen.

But the rationale behind the practice may not be as easy to eradicate. These kids are asked, “Why don’t you be a nurse?” when they want to be a doctor. They hear, “Why don’t you be a teacher?” when they want to be a principal. That attitude is embedded in the education system much more deeply than any one specific policy. One of the reasons we have this lack of diversity at the entry level is because of this early rerouting. The racism that’s going to affect kids later in their lives and in their careers starts early, before middle school.

To counteract this, companies need to go into schools in this early phase and take chances. They need to help create and fund science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM, programs for kids, and support teachers in encouraging kids toward STEM careers and other forms of high-skilled work. They need to send representatives who are themselves Black, Indigenous and people of colour, or BIPOC, because kids often don’t get the chance to relate to people like them who’ve made it.

Diverse hiring starts with helping to change the system that produces your candidates in the first place.

However, the problem of blind spots is harder to address. People who are hiring or writing human-resources policies know the literature and the reports. They know these things about pipelines – this is their job. So when someone’s job is to find talent and they say they don’t know how to find diverse candidates, it’s either a blind spot or bad faith. Let’s give folks the benefit of the doubt and say it’s a blind spot.

Companies need to look deeper. There are not enough diverse candidates, it’s true – but they do exist. Try to hire them sooner. Pick up from where you left off with supporting high-skilled careers for BIPOC kids in elementary and high schools. Create opportunities such as internships and apprenticeships. Go to places beyond the standard job fairs for your recruitment. Research ways to reach your desired candidates on their home turf rather than sticking with the same old approaches that get you the same middling results.

Finally, there’s the issue of diversity after the hiring process is completed – namely how BIPOC employees are being treated at the workplace. The individual human stories at the micro level often contradict a lot of corporate messaging about diversity. Yes, companies may have quotas and policies, and all kinds of good intentions, but how does that translate on the ground when employees are dealing with middle managers?

BIPOC employees are often the victims of “diversity hire” resentment and everyday racism. They’re passed over for promotions and not given chances. Equity, diversity and inclusion programs are often not well crafted, they’re by and large not successful, and they’re sometimes even faked. They often tend to alienate many of the people they’re theoretically intended to target, because they’re built by (and often for) the white people in the company. We also see plenty of training programs to help white people understand diversity and racism, but we generally don’t see programs to support people of colour once they’re in the workplace.

Hiring managers also often talk about their concern about setting diverse candidates up for failure. They see diversity hiring as a compromise rather than as a strength, because they expect diverse candidates to be underperformers. Faced with that expectation, these candidates are given fewer chances, allowed less margin for error and punished disproportionately when they fail. But I’ve seen white men fail spectacularly, sometimes in front of their whole industry, and still go on to get more jobs despite their mediocrity – a case in which they are actually being set up for failure.

Hiring managers need to hire potential, take chances, and – crucially – give diverse hires the support they need to get back on their feet once they mess up. And companies need to shift their understanding of failure. I’ve written about this in the context of small-business funding, in which women are funded based on track record while men are funded based on their ideas. The same is true in workplaces, and it applies to BIPOC employees, too. Moreover, large organizations often don’t have a succession plan that includes diversity as a criterion.

All these problems are solvable, but they need to be faced head-on, with the understanding that having a diverse work force doesn’t start and end at the point of hiring. It involves creating a pipeline, supporting those hires once they arrive, and promoting and grooming them for leadership so they’re in a position to do the hiring themselves and help perpetuate positive change in the corporate culture.