Chapter Six
Hiring/Advancement Bias
One of the most common complaints we hear from organizational leaders seeking to increase diversity and inclusion is that there aren’t enough diverse, qualified candidates. We never want to seem condescending, but there are plenty of people of all races and ethnicities and all educational and experience levels seeking employment.
There is a privilege that comes with representing an institution. We expect candidates to find us. After all, we are offering jobs. And the candidates with access and exposure will find us. Unfortunately, that often means people who are connected and networked within the same systems as the institution and its existing workforce will find us. In many situations, even if diverse, qualified staff, are in the workforce, they don’t seem to be promoted into leadership positions.
Hiring/advancement bias presents itself in a multitude of ways:
• Homogeneous workforce
• Diversity concentrated at the lowest levels of the organization
• Homogeneous applicants
• Lack of visible diversity in leadership
• Lack of diversity recruitment/retention strategy
• Lack of concern about diversity
• Failure to invest in mentoring, professional development, and succession planning
• Failure to cast a wide recruiting net
• Disqualification of candidates based on ethnic names
• Disqualification of candidates based on social media photos
• Disqualification of candidates based on accents/dialects
• Disqualification of candidates based on anything that is not related to the job duties
• Disqualification of candidates because they aren’t a “culture fit”
These are just a few of the many ways hiring bias can present itself. Let’s take a closer look at them.
Homogeneous Workforce
We encounter a lot of workplaces that have become homogeneous. This is often the result of relying too heavily on employee referrals, employee networks, alma maters, and so on. A workplace is still homogeneous if its 100 percent minority owned and operated, so this isn’t just a white thing. If only one race, gender, or other demographic is represented, it’s homogeneous and poses a business risk. Companies with diverse employee populations and diverse leadership are more profitable, innovative, and resilient.
You have to remember that a candidate who does not see diversity represented at your organization has no way of knowing whether it happened by design or by default. The United States, in particular, is not that many decades removed from legally banning minority groups from the workplace. In fact, some minority groups can still be legally excluded from the workplace in many states. The state of Virginia, for instance, allows employers to terminate sexual minorities or not hire them because they identify as LGBTQIA, so there are still workplaces that would rather not be bothered with diversity.
Even when forces mandate inclusion, the attitude of intolerance creates an air of hostility that bedevils minorities in ways that cause undue stress, anxiety, and disillusionment. No one wants to work in under such conditions. It is therefore very important that your organization be authentic in its understanding whether its homogeneous workforce is deliberate or accidental. Once you determine that there is bias in your workplace, whether accidental or deliberate, you have a responsibility to rectify the situation
Diversity Concentrated at the Lowest Levels of the Organization
Some companies are able to hire diverse, qualified staff, but only for entry-level assignments. In this case, leaders need to be charting paths for lower-level employees to advance and be promoted over time. Diversity concentrated at the bottom is a detractor for diverse high-potential candidates. If people do not see reflections of themselves in leadership, they are apt to believe that the job you are posting is a dead-end career move.
Diversity at the entry level is not inherently problematic. However, experiencing diversity concentrated at the bottom of the organizational chart as sufficiently representative is not a very inclusive outlook. If your organization is not actively asking why the organization is segregated by employment classification, then you do have an issue that raises concerns. We do not wish to be the bearers of bad news, but pretending something is okay in the face of clear evidence of institutional bias is not socially responsible.
None of us wants to believe that we are part of the problem. Nonetheless, if you have any degree of leadership, management, administrative, hiring, or other instrumental influence within an organizational and you do nothing to address these issues, you are part of the problem. It really is as simple as that. It is not anyone else’s job to fix it. It is your job to see the problem, investigate it, evaluate your role in perpetuating the bias, define your new role in erasing the bias, and cultivate allies before pursuing the six steps to erase it once and for all.
Homogeneous Applicants/Homogeneous Leadership
People frequently tell us they aren’t getting enough demographic representation during the recruitment phase. It is not enough to say something, you must do something. Cast a wider net. Go where the people are. If your organization or leadership is homogeneous, diverse applicants have no way of knowing whether this is by default or by design.
It is your organization’s responsibility to show up where people are and put out a welcome mat. Visit different colleges and universities, professional association for various ethnicities and demographics, and expand your network to include new people in new places.
Scanning to expand is one way to grow your network. Some of you may remember the chapter called “Scan to Expand” in Overcoming Bias. When it comes to scanning to expand, notions such as being colorblind or gender-neutral need to be put aside, as does any interpretation of a comfort zone.
Consider your circle or in-group: what does that demographic look like? What are their political views? If the mental diversity inventory you’re doing right now finds itself wanting, then it may be time to expand your circle. Look for ways to connect yourself to new viewpoints and new habits. These goals can be gradual and range in magnitude, but the effort and objectives remain the same. Here are some possibilities:
• Volunteer to join diverse teams and committees.
• Out yourself as a cultural ally by standing up when biased comments are made.
• Seek out the opinions of your colleagues from your out-group.
• Make suggestions that are respectful of the opinions, experiences, and perspectives of your out-groups.
• Expand the list of people you invite to work-related or after-work outings.1
Scanning to expand is never a one-and-done deal. It necessitates deliberate effort and ongoing, intentional choice to open up your in-group. This solution is applicable to many of the recruitment-based bias challenges.
Lack of Diversity Recruitment/Retention Strategy
Does your recruitment strategy only include posting jobs in mainstream outlets? Are you reaching out to a broad array of representative communities? Organizational recruiters often overlook minority publications, diverse media outlets, and places like historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs).
Is your slate of candidates diverse? Some organizations go so far as to refuse to proceed with an interview panel until the candidate pool is diverse. You have a 100 percent chance of failing to diversify your staff if the only people who make it to the interviews are homogeneous. And a minority candidate has no statistical chance of being hired if they are the only one. Women and racial minorities are more likely to be hired if there are at least two minority groups represented in the slate of candidates.2
Failure to Invest in Mentoring, Professional Development, and Succession Planning
If your organization is able to recruit and hire diverse, qualified staff, is that where your effort stops? Are you also taking steps to engage, develop, promote, and retain that same staff? Are the people being developed, engaged, and promoted all representative of one race or gender? Do people of all demographics know where they fall in the succession plan?
We recognize that these are tough questions, and sometimes the answers are even tougher. Nonetheless, if we seek to instigate change and improvement, it is imperative that we be willing to examine the facts.
Disqualification of Candidates Based on Ethnic Names
Some people are not aware that this happens, but recruiters have admitted that they disqualify candidates when their names sound ethnic. Sometimes it’s black names, names that sound foreign, or names they find hard to pronounce. These recruiters often feel they are doing the organization a huge favor by keeping ethnic-sounding people out of the running. They believe that the person won’t enjoy having their name constantly mispronounced, or that the foreign person might cause the organization undue stress because people might not understand their accent. The recruiters are, of course, assuming that a foreign name will be attached to an incomprehensible accent.
How people handle accents is interesting. People are often given an incredible amount of grief over their accents. In the context of our training, we frequently ask people with accents to identify themselves. Typically, a handful of people from various nations raise their hands. We then take a moment to remind everyone in the room that we all speak with accents, we just have a habit of being in the company of people with the same accent as our own. If you relocate anyone and drop them on the other side of their country or into another country, their accent will become very apparent to those around them.
The intent of this exercise is to help people see that ostracizing or becoming frustrated with people because of their speech patterns is short-sighted and unfair. All it takes to understand an accent is patience and practice. And we must increase our compassion toward one another to care enough to make that small but significant effort.
Disqualification of Candidates Based on Social Media Photos
Many articles warn job seekers to be mindful of what they place on social media. Employers can find you online and if they see you behaving in a manner unbefitting an employee of their organization, well, they may move on. It is certainly not legal to disqualify based on the categories that are protected in your organization, city, state, or nation. And protected catagories do vary from nation to nation and state to state. But it is legal, in the United States for instance, to use social media as an extension of a resume to ascertain the sincerity, credibility, and professionalism of a candidate.
The problem with social media screening is that humans are inherently biased and they may take action beyond what is legal. Again, this may not always be intentional, but it can become a form of institutional bias if left unchecked, and if it results in the screening out of some demographics and not others.
Candidate “Culture Fit”
When an organization achieves enough success that they are in a position to increase their workforce, they sometimes attribute part or all of their success to the existing workplace culture. The existing culture may very well be a major reason for their success. Unfortunately, organizational culture fit is not a great way to weed out candidates. Diversity of thought, education, perspective, and countless other variables have been proven to increase profitability, group intelligence, and efficacy in organizations. Nonetheless, hiring managers have been known to reject applicants on the basis of culture fit.
People from diverse demographics lose job opportunities as a result of being a poor culture fit—meaning “they won’t fit in.” This unoriginal excuse for supporting hegemony, or the predominant culture, is an admission that an organizational culture is weak, fragile, and unsupportive of people.
A Princeton University meta-analysis indicated that there has been no change in the rates of hiring discrimination against African Americans between 1990 and 2015. Explicit racism has declined, but the subtle forms of bias have not changed over time.3
In the case of hiring bias, anyone in the organization, including you, can own the responsibility of identifying the bias at play. Someone must call the bias out and name it for what it is. Once you and your allies agree on the bias operating within a given system, it’s time to (1) set a clear intention.
• We have a hiring bias and we want to eliminate it.
How do you know you have a hiring bias? Can you prove it? If you can substantiate the claim and confirm it with data, you may be able to attract more allies and get traction for subsequent action. Gather all of the data you can to prove your hypothesis. Always (2) lead with data as it is more effective than relying solely on emotional appeals. Leverage your allies to use their connections and resources as force multipliers to expedite this process and every other step along the way.
• Data indicate that our staff is largely homogeneous. Most of our staff share a socioeconomic class, race, and educational status.
Be thorough in your data gathering. Are you looking at coincidences or patterns that bear out the same results? An (3) accurate diagnosis will help sustain the effort and facilitate overcoming objections.
• We hire our employees from the same recruiting sources. Our candidate pool is also homogeneous. We actually want diversity but we never achieve it.
Once you are confident that you have sufficient data to support an accurate diagnosis and your intention to eliminate a specific system bias is clear, it’s time to (4) deconstruct. Eliminating subjective processes helps ferret out biases that have become embedded within systems.
• We are removing limiting constructs from the hiring process including “culture fit,” “shared interests,” and “appearance.”
After systems have been successfully deconstructed and subjective bias rooted out, then it is time to rebuild. (5) Reconstructing with objectivity introduces transparency and accountability for the maintenance of unbiased systems. Berrett-Koehler Publishers modeled this step with the following “Individual Performance Standards” that were created to decrease bias in hiring and increase diversity in the organization.
• Applicant’s track record of proactively taking initiative to institute innovations and advances that addressed needs, solved problems, and exploited opportunities
• Applicant’s history of performing responsibilities with accuracy, completeness, timeliness, and efficiency
• Applicant’s history of making themselves accountable for performance and delivering on their accountabilities
• Applicant’s history of continually advancing their own learning and development
• Applicant’s history of maintaining a positive, engaged, committed attitude, even in a challenging environment
• Applicant’s history of collaborating well with coworkers and being a supportive and responsible citizen in previous organizational settings
The final step is to (6) build in accountability and ongoing measurement. New systems need clear accountability and success metrics to support sustainability. If the system updates are measured, progress can be documented and recalibrated as needed. Accountability ensures that all parties with access to system inputs continue to maintain the integrity of the intended changes.
• We will empower a hiring review team to ensure the bias-prevention steps are implemented. Failure to adhere to the hiring protocol will result in immediate corrective action. The team will continue to monitor and measure progress from the original baseline toward any stated goals.
Wishing and hoping for changes in hiring and advancement bias, as with other institutional bias, is insufficient for disrupting the status quo. Clear, organized, decisive action is required. The six steps can be instrumental in aiding you as you begin the journey of erasing systemic bias.
If you have read this far, then you are likely aware of at least one bias that may be plaguing your organization. That is assuming you did not already know what the issue was before you picked up this book. At this point, you should see a clear pattern for addressing your specific institutional bias using the six-step formula.
There is a tremendous power in naming the problem. There is even more power in quantifying the problem and supporting your hypothesis with metrics. Approaching the issues of institutional bias with the surgical precision of a scientist in search of measurable solutions is a sure way to garner support from like-minded people.
The bottom line is that most people believe that they are inherently good. While there is a minority of people who are cruel and proud of it, we believe that humanity is largely made up of decent people who are doing their best, or at the very least, trying to do their best. It is one thing to meander through one’s work life without seeing, naming, or consciously acknowledging the disparities and injustices that simmer beneath the surface of an organizational culture. It is another thing entirely to be shown the subtle discriminatory behaviors or consequences affecting actual human beings in your proximity.
If you succeed in making a strong enough case using the four preparatory steps, what you reveal to your colleagues can usually not be unseen. Turning a blind eye to the problem once it has been named and enumerated is just cruel. And, again, you have to do the hard work of figuring out who will be threatened by the revelation of injustice. Answering the discernment questions in chapter 2 in advance of your cultivating allies is critical.