Be the change you want to see in the world. This is a common motivational saying that we wholeheartedly agree with for the hiring industry. The available workforce currently job-hunting rarely matches role-demand perfectly. There will always be more entry and mid-level professionals when you’re hiring for leads. There will always be more majority demographic candidates when you’re looking to include minorities in your hiring. This isn’t anyone’s fault, it’s a simple matter of statistics. Fortunately, statistics can be changed – especially on a small scale within your own sphere of influence. The single most powerful answer for any business looking to change the landscape of available candidates is to nurture that change. You can be the change you want to see by taking steps that bring that diversity around.

Define Your Diversity Hiring Goals

Diversity & Inclusion professionals are constantly striving to avoid tokenism by the numbers. It can be difficult to outright say “We’re too homogenous, we need more X, Y, and Z people on the team”. Hiring for each individual role, the choice needs to be based on the most qualified and best-suited candidates, completely disregarding their demographic features. However, to make progress, first you have to know where you’re going.

Define your goals in terms of inclusivity instead of diversity. Who isn’t included, despite your openness to diversity hires?

Identify the Obstacles

If your hiring managers are truly hiring with neutrality, but diversity is not the result, what is standing in the way? Usually, the answer lies in access to diverse candidates who fit the roles you’re hiring for.  There may not be enough female engineers to go around, or local socio-cultural standards tend to take diverse professionals into other industries. We often find diversity to be more prominent at entry-level to mid-level with a steep drop off after mid-level management. Women, in particular, tend to take management roles but are less likely to reach the top executive levels.

Nurture the Success You Want to See

So ask yourself: What would you do if there just weren’t enough engineers available for hire? You would invest in training more engineers; whether that meant college scholarships in engineering or creating an internal engineer training track from lower-level technical positions. This is how you would be the change you wanted to see in the workforce.

Apply this same proactive approach to your diversity hiring and the answer becomes simple. If most of your company’s diverse hiring focuses on lower levels, then focus on internal career development tracks. Provide the training and experience needed to promote your diverse employees to higher levels.

Sponsor participation in training courses and reward employees who achieve career development by promoting them up the chain. You will not only increase your own internal diversity, you will also become an industry leader in creating the diverse upper-level professionals that everyone wants to hire.

Break Your Own Glass Ceiling

Be ready to shatter your own glass ceiling and existing hiring trends as your internally trained managers rise through the ranks. Once you begin to nurture career development, the last step is to make sure that you’re hiring your upper-level management from the pool of pros you have developed to be capable in these roles. So many companies reach outside for senior positions. But most of what you will find externally is the status-quo: older members of the homogenous traditionalist.

To truly create the diversity changes you want to see, you must not only generate internal management diversity; you must also internally promote to the highest positions from the professionals you are developing.

Don’t Go It Alone: Bring Your Industry Into the Fold

The final piece of the puzzle is not to be an island of good strategy. If internal career development and hiring is working to create a more diverse internal workforce, why keep that to yourself? One company is not an island. Your industry’s available workforce is created from the choices and opportunities of every business in your industry. If you want diverse external hires or good opportunities for your employees when they need to move on, this development method should spread to the entire industry.

Conclusion

Reach out to your colleagues, business partners, and even your competition. Speak at conventions about what has worked for you and how you can nurture both objective skill-based assessments and create greater professional diversity. Get other companies to start becoming the change you all want to see in workforce diversity, from promising new hires to senior management positions. Contact us for more insights into recruiting and hiring success.