3 Solutions to Help Your Recruiting Leader and DEI Leader Partner Effectively
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Here is a hard truth. Your initiative to increase diversity could be failing because of one factor—there are two critical teams that have no clue how to work together beyond a cursory, check-the-box partnership. Who are those two teams?
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Office + the Recruiting Department
Here is another truth. It is not due to a lack of desire that they do not work effectively. It is likely that DEI and recruiting want to work together and they do not know how.
The conversation between the two teams typically (not always) goes like this:
D&I Leader: We are now approved to start diversity recruiting as a part of our overall DEI strategy plan.
Recruiting Leader: Great. How do I start?
D&I Leader: I don’t know how you start; RECRUITING is your area of expertise.
Recruiting Leader: I don’t know how to start; DIVERSITY is your area of expertise.
Both statements are true. The DEI office has experts in matters related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. The recruiting department has experts in matters related to sourcing, recruiting, and making selection decisions. DEI must understand the world of recruiting to know where to help, and/or recruiting must understand the world of DEI in order to know what specific support is available and needed.
Launching a diversity recruiting program requires a solid partnership between the DEI office and the recruiting department. However, you are faced with the “chicken or the egg” dilemma. Which comes first? Does recruiting lead the implementation of diversity recruiting because they are experts in recruiting, or does DEI lead the implementation of diversity recruiting because they are experts in diversity and inclusion?
Here is the answer. BOTH.
The intersection of recruiting and DEI is its own area of expertise—one that requires the knowledge of foundational recruiting concepts AND knowledge of foundational concepts in diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Who within your organization has expertise in both recruiting and DEI? If no one, then how does an organization build internal proficiency in both? This is the impasse that leaders face when implementing diversity recruiting programs. Two teams want to work together but are not quite certain where to start.
As a recruiting leader, I can recall reaching this impasse on multiple occasions. I remember feeling the pressure of my organization looking to the recruiting department to be the superhero of increasing diversity. I remember feeling the pressure of my team looking to me for guidance and direction on how to increase diversity when I barely understood the work myself. As a novice, I typically did what other recruiting leaders do when implementing diversity recruiting:
Path #1: I continued to do what was familiar. This included ensuring my team had access to unconscious bias training, posting on job boards that focused on marginalized groups, and that we talked more about laws and prohibited actions against protected classes.
Path #2: I looked for and participated in external diversity recruiting training.
Path #3: I searched for an external search agency to outsource diversity recruiting.
My experience was that none of these paths were proactive, comprehensive or strategic enough to profoundly move the needle in increasing diversity. Path #1 was not expansive enough in strategy or action. Logically, I knew that we could not continue taking the same actions and expecting new results. With path #2, I was always shocked by the lack of diversity recruiting training available. I was irritated that the learning objectives in these training programs rarely went beyond how to conduct sophisticated Boolean string searches. It was simply teaching our team of recruiters how to sit behind a computer continuing to make assumptions about a person’s race, sexual orientation, and gender identity, etc. And path #3 was not financially sustainable long term. I became increasingly frustrated because I could not pinpoint what was missing.
As a recruiting leader or a DEI leader, do you know this feeling all too well? If so, here are three solutions that I recommend to clients wanting to build a stronger partnership across the aisle in an effort to implement a best practice diversity recruiting program.
Solution #1: Cross Develop. Consider moving one of your recruiters into DEI for six months or longer. Consider moving one of your DEI specialists into recruiting for six months or longer. Like any rotational program, determine the components of the job that are most important to learn during the rotation. This immersive experience helps to expedite learning.
Solution #2: Education. Deeply invest in the education of your recruiting leader. Provide access to quality education regarding DEI, history, social justice, and even psychology. Empower your recruiting leader to be just as knowledgeable about diversity and inclusion as their DEI peer. This will allow your recruiting leader and DEI leader to be thought partners to each other and sounding boards for new initiatives that affect recruiting.
Solution #3: Partner with an External Liaison. While you are working to cross develop employees and while your recruiting leader is working on their DEI learning, consider partnering with a diversity recruiting consulting firm that can be the translator or the liaison between the two departments. Recruiting is a dense subject; DEI is a dense subject. Most practitioners build career paths around one area or the other. In order to found our firm, I made the decision to leave recruiting in order to dive deeply into DEI, social justice and history, only to come back to recruiting and better synthesize DEI in context to recruiting. A solid diversity recruiting consulting firm can translate DEI in context to recruiting. As a firm, we are now able to synthesize these learnings into our training programs.
In retrospect, one thing I had never considered about DEI when I was only working as a recruiter is that our struggle to increase representation is linked to the seemingly small and often biased company decisions we make daily. To increase diversity, we have to begin asking the right questions to uncover those seemingly small decisions that are preventing our ability to meet our own initiatives. It is not just about what we must start doing, it is also about what we must stop doing.
One thing I had never considered about our work in recruiting until I started working in DEI is that recruiting is ultimately based on measuring value. The challenge we all face is in the answer to one question. What is valuable? What is valuable to this position, department, business unit, and/or company? What we value has a lot to do with who we are, how we identify, what society tells us is valuable, and even what our employers tell us is valuable too.
Without key considerations like the above being shared across the aisle in a partnership between recruiting and DEI, diversity recruiting programs will continue to be ill equipped to move the dial in increasing representation. Find a way within your organization to bridge the communication between these two departments so that you can be well on your way to making positive change.
Join the conversation in the comments. What’s another solution to ensuring DEI and Recruiting can work together more effectively?
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