Over the course of this year, the trajectory of corporate diversity-and-inclusion efforts has been particularly under a spotlight. Protests in the wake of George Floyd’s killing prompted many organizations to commit publicly to more equity-conscious efforts, while the remote-working conditions brought on by the pandemic made more starkly evident the economic and social disparity among different communities. So how can employers, amid these conditions and grappling with an ever-changing work environment, successfully recruit diverse candidates–and keep them?

Executives from across multiple sectors convened recently to talk about these issues in a From Day One webinar, moderated by Fast Company contributing editor Lydia Dishman, titled “Diversity Hiring: Innovative Ways for Companies to Meet Their Goals.”

Chief among the key factors for success, the panelists agreed, are out-of-the-box thinking, transparency, follow-through and, in actuality, listening to diverse voices in the first place.

“After a lot of the social unrest and really just emotional exhaustion from a lot of the employees here, we began to get together and really have candid conversations about, What are pillars? What do we really want?,” said Brittany King-Offord, a lead talent-acquisition manager at AT&T.

“What do we want people to buy into and, currently as a corporation, then how can we sit back and create the branding around it to where we can engage potential candidates [who] want to believe that AT&T is not just talking the talk, but we’re also walking the walk?,” said King-Offord.

“So we actually enhanced one of our programs called AT&T Believes, where we are going back into the communities and really serving–not just with doing basic community service,” she said. “We’re also looking at, How do we engage with upskilling opportunities and also other education opportunities to engage potential candidates ... to create a pipeline that makes sense–so they can reap the benefits of the conversations that we’re having internally?”

The value of a talent-development pipeline, particularly in letting candidates know what jobs exist and encouraging them to apply, was repeatedly touched upon throughout the webinar.

“Things that we’ve seen a lot of organizations starting to adopt: One, to go beyond just the traditional diversity job boards,” said Leah Daniels, SVP of strategy at Appcast, a developer of programmatic job-advertising technology. “That’s an unfortunate box-checking exercise that we have seen,” she said, since “there are low volumes of people engaging on those sites.” She recommends looking for candidates on a much broader level. Her second recommendation was to reach out to many different kinds of colleges. “Just because they’re not a historically black college does not mean that they don’t have variety of great candidates and opportunities,” Daniels said.

Daniels offered a third piece of advice: “Taking a really hard look at your job descriptions and requirements and asking, Are you creating barriers to diversity unintentionally? Does this position really require a four-year degree or master’s degree? Are we just asking for that because we can?,” she said. “And so really making sure you’re reaching a diverse audience and you’re not asking them to opt out. One of the things we know is that women and people of color, particularly, are more likely to try to match all the requirements in your job description, where oftentimes white men will not. They will say, ‘close enough,’ and they’ll still apply for your job. So if you’ve created the bar too high, you’ve actually created an opportunity for candidates to take themselves out of contention–without even the need to do it. So really making sure that you are asking for things that are real, as opposed to a wish list.”

Follow-through is just as important. Candidates need to see evidence of companies truly enacting their pledges and policies regarding diversity and inclusion, with potential employees wanting to “see performatively” that organizations are living up to their commitments, according to Chad Nico Hiu, senior director of diversity and inclusion at YMCA of the USA.

Before reaching out to candidates, individual leaders should look inward. “We sometimes, as leaders in this area, or trying to be leaders in this area, jump to the organizational change before we do the individual work,” he said. “What is our own bias? What is our own learning, where are our own blind spots, how does that show up in the policies we proposed or the leadership we try to embody in the spaces we aim to create?”

Organizations need to provide solid evidence that they've got what job candidates are looking for. Earlier in the year, Hiu said, “Everyone was looking for three words in somebody’s statement: Did you have Black Lives Matter? And if you didn’t, you got nailed. Very rarely did we see, initially, the words address systemic racism, foster anti-oppressive tactics, and ensure that all people feel safe and welcome. The tactics to the performative aspect of this work sometimes get glossed over.”

Hiu quoted a favorite saying of a colleague: “How do we make this a movement, not a moment?" He continued: “That’s a part of what I think we all are trying to talk about in diversity. There’s a movement here that, if we don’t lose it, can change the makeup of every one of our sectors, every one of our companies, every one of our neighborhoods, if we hold onto it and systematize it while people are still paying attention.”

He added: “There’s a need to ask the candidates that we keep, What has made you stay?, instead of assuming. There’s a need to make sure that employee resource groups or business resource groups are tapped into deciding how we talk about them.”

Yvonne Soto, executive director of organizational development and effectiveness for the New York City Department of Education, said the department had already made concrete strides and demonstrably reached its diversity-and-inclusion goals, with over 50% of new teachers this year–for the first time–identifying as people of color. But she too stressed the necessity to be vigilant and continue showing evidence of the department’s follow-through to candidates, staff members, and the wider community.

“One of the points that I want to make is not grandstanding or having platitudes around pledges, but how can we ensure that that’s embedded into the fabric of what we do through our priorities and core values–and really centering the voices of people of color within our organization to inform our decisions as we move forward?” Soto said. “So as we think about returning to work and what that looks like–and creating return-to-work guidance and resources, how can we lead with inclusivity and empathy? How can we acknowledge that there has been disproportionality to our black colleagues and Asian colleagues across the system?” she asked, emphasizing the need to ensure “that they play a role and reviewing our resources around structured interviewing, diversity, recruitment, toolkits, etc., to ensure that we are going beyond just the mission and vision, but also ensuring that employee voice is centered in the conversation.”

And while proactivity, innovation and concrete achievement are imperative, so too is transparency, which is needed in order to maintain that drive, said Monique Carswell, head of associate and customer engagement at the Walmart Foundation. “When you make these announcements and commitments, you have to continue to let people know where you are on that journey. So here’s where we are; here’s how we’re getting there,” Carswell said, which should apply both internally and externally. At Walmart, “we’ve moved from an annual diversity report to mid-year. So how can we continue to make improvements and let people know where we are at the same time?,” she said, recommending “constant communication and feedback flow.”

She added: “In terms of our current associates, and even the pipeline of folks who are looking to work for us, there’s this sense of urgency. So you want to act swiftly, you want to come out big, you want to come out strong, but at the same time, you have to have this steady momentum. So do you have the actual tools in place internally?” Maintaining consistent, effective procedures can be “a huge hurdle, depending on the size of your organization,” she said, especially given variations in “where everybody is coming from and where they’re at on that journey. So you do have to have a little bit of grace around that and continue to question yourselves and your actions.”

Editor's note: You can watch a video of the webinar here. Please visit our conference page to register for more upcoming events.

Sheila Flynn is a Chicago-based journalist who has written for the Associated Press, the Sunday Independent, the Irish Daily Mail and the Irish Times. She is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame.

Skills-Based Hiring: Getting Started and Overcoming Common Objections

It’s never been easier to put skills-based hiring into practice. The tools and the resources are there–and the potential benefits are abundant. And yet, some leaders and hiring managers are skeptical.“One of the major positives about the skills-based approach is that it adds more science and rigor to the hiring process,” said Christopher Rotolo, vice president of global talent at Mitek. Adding science, Rotolo says, adds objectivity, which can remove some of the bias and “increase the validity of the whole hiring process.”“The fact is that over 60% of people don’t have a college degree. But that hasn’t stopped employers from benchmarking candidates that way,” said moderator Lydia Dishman, senior editor for growth and engagement at Fast Company. Dishman moderated a panel of leaders during From Day One’s recent webinar about Skills-Based Hiring: Getting Started and Overcoming Uncommon Objections.Unconscious bias can easily creep into the hiring process when looking at a candidate’s resume, which can reveal indicators like elite educational opportunities, prestige, race, and even generational wealth, none of which are necessarily predictors of career success. Hiring almost exclusively on skill can help employers dial into what really matters.Rather than focusing on degrees, says Amanda Richardson, CEO and head of people at CoderPad, “You have to dissect the role into the skills that are needed, working with the hiring manager and people who are currently in the role. The most important part of the conversation is not just ‘What are the skills?’ but ‘What does good look like?’” This approach requires more in-depth conversations between hiring managers and department leaders to get a stronger sense of not only what success looks like, but how previous successes can be communicated during the interview process.“I find that taking a practical approach [means] literally saying, ‘What does a great answer sound like? Does this person really know what they're talking about?’” said Stacey Olive, VP of talent acquisition and employer branding for Medidata, Dassault Systemes.“Because there’s not an empirical objective test for everything, we really have to go based on our conversations with people.” This means hiring managers need to prepare upfront so they can infer if they’re hearing “flowery language” merely alluding to past success, or if a candidate actually has lived experience that will be beneficial to the role.Focusing on skills-based hiring isn’t just a great way to reduce unconscious bias, it can also make the hiring process quicker. “A little bit of upfront work on understanding and aligning on the skills and the level of the skills needed will actually make a much faster hiring experience,” Richardson said.Semoneel Bamboat, VP and global head of diversity, inclusion and talent acquisition at Capri Holdings, shares that while her organization has a rubric within which they score talent competencies on a scale of one to five, her team does not let the skill scoring fully dictate the conversation.“While we have numbers and rigor around it, nothing is set in stone,” she said. “The purpose of that really is so we can cast this wide net. We don’t want to be that specific, because we don’t want to then lose sight of someone that might not fit that exactly.” Skills-forward hiring should be used to identify previously untapped candidates, not a blanket way to eliminate unusual or creative choices that could be an interesting fit.Richardson adds that getting too technical in the taxonomy can overwhelm the conversation, especially as hiring managers try to parse the subtleties between junior and senior versions of the same role. “I've seen the situation where developers start arguing about the nuances of ‘What does it mean to be very proficient versus mildly proficient?’ And I think you can lose the forest for the trees pretty quickly.”Copying and pasting old job descriptions when looking to fill a role is no longer enough. Instead, there should be periodic check-ins to make sure descriptions are up-to-date as the nature of the work, and therefore the role, continues to evolve. Part of this can be solved by shortening and simplifying the job listing. “It tends to be a lengthy laundry list of desires and needs. Instead, employers should aim to distill it into ‘What is the required skill for success?’” Olive said.With an eye toward DEI, Bamboat’s organization uses short external job listings with neutral language, keeping the more elaborate and specific job description for internal use only among the hiring team. “We take a lot of the details out to be able to cast that wide net,” she said.“We never want to post the exact job and be very specific about those requirements, because we feel like we’re decreasing our talent pool.” Bamboat shared the well-known study that showed women tend to only apply for jobs where they feel they will fit every single benchmark. Shortening the list of requirements can make it more inclusive. Once candidates make it to the interview phase, the hiring manager can discuss the specific details from the full listing to gauge if it’s a fit.In conversation moderated by Lydia Dishman of Fast Company, the panelists discussed the topic “Skills-Based Hiring: Getting Started and Overcoming Common Objections” (photo by From Day One)Pamela Rodas, global senior director of talent acquisition at Telus International, hires for a company with more than 3,000 types of job profiles, all of which are changing rapidly as her organization embraces hybrid workplaces and remote opportunities. In turn, she and her team must change how they assess skills. For example, her newer sales development hires may not have been exposed to an in-person environment where they could hone their technique. Therefore, she finds herself hiring more for soft skills or what Dishman prefers to call power skills, especially as the post-pandemic corporate environment has higher than ever expectations. “All of our clients want to go faster. So forget about skills, do you know how to do the job and do it in less time?” Rodas said.Trying to identify those more amorphous qualities, like being a fast learner, in a candidate can be a challenge. Panelists offered two solutions. The first is reviewing case studies. “To identify these characteristics that lead to outstanding performance, you study what those outstanding performers do,” Rotolo said.The second, is conducting actual testing during the hiring process. “Work simulations can be helpful, whether that means programming together for two hours or sitting and doing a sales demo. What are those real-world experiences where you can actually test the proof points?” Richardson said. Just having a great conversation in an interview is not necessarily enough.But the interview process can still be helpful if you are asking the right questions. “The research still says that behaviorally based questions are the most valid. And there’s really two types: ‘Tell me about a time when’’ past experiences, or situational questions,” Rotolo said.Rodas believes it’s also important to have an honest conversation about the nature of the role and pay attention to the applicant’s response. “The recruiter can [now] spend more time with the candidate talking about how they would endure the type of workload we’re going to put on them. In any type of business today, that’s worth 10 times more,” she said.This also means asking the right questions internally too, to ensure there is no unconscious bias at play and that a candidate’s competency is still at the forefront. “We have an opportunity now to ask [hiring managers], ‘What's the basis of your decision?’” Olive said. “You have to understand and politely point out where you think you see bias happening.”Katie Chambers is a freelance writer and award-winning communications executive with a lifelong commitment to supporting artists and advocating for inclusion. Her work has been seen in HuffPost, Honeysuckle Magazine, and several printed essay collections, among others, and she has appeared on Cheddar News, iWomanTV, and CBS New York.

The Long-Term Shortage of Talent in the Post-Industrial Age: How Companies Can Respond

In the early industrial age, companies had a hierarchy built around manufacturing and machinery. But now workplaces are organized much differently. Their new priority? The talent. We’ve entered an era where the shortage of workers, obsolescence of skills, and new levels of employee agency will present employers with historic challenges. Most companies are not ready.The new Intelligence Age is a time when skills, employee creativity, information and AI will define our companies. In a recent From Day One webinar about “The Long-Term Shortage of Talent in the Post-Industrial Age: How Companies Can Respond,” speakers explored three strategies for success: rethinking the organization as dynamic rather than static, rethinking management with human-centered leadership, and rethinking HR as no longer an expense center, but rather a function like R&D that must build and invest in the company's people.All told, this means we need to redesign our companies around the person and shift to a new model for work. The time to act is now, experts say.The Changing Power Structure in the Labor MarketThe renowned Josh Bersin, founder & CEO of The Josh Bersin Company, says that with Baby Boomers retiring and declining fertility rates, there will be smaller generations coming forward to replace them. Employers will have a high demand for skilled workers but a much smaller talent pool, he says.“If you look at the supply and demand of workers and the labor force, it’s absolutely different from what we’ve seen in the past,” said Sania Khan, chief economist and head of market insights at Eightfold, an AI-driven talent intelligence platform.This could signal tough times ahead, especially in an age where companies are defined more and more by people and ideas than by machinery and products. “Scarcity of talent is one of the biggest challenges out there for companies,” said moderator Steve Koepp, From Day One’s chief content officer and co-Founder.Bersin notes that his company is getting consistent feedback from employers post-pandemic that they are having trouble sourcing new talent and with the retention of what is “a highly empowered workforce. We have employees saying, ‘I'm going to quietly quit. I'm going to work my wage. I'm going to do what I need to do. I don’t care what you say. You don’t like hybrid work? Tough luck, I’ll go find a job where I can work remotely.”Bersin predicts this is a long-term trend, and companies need to get smarter about finding and keeping their people. This is especially true in industries like healthcare, which is facing a major labor shortage despite a recent BLS report predicting 54% of new jobs will be in healthcare due in part to that same aging population that is decreasing the workforce.A Renewed Focus on Employees and ProductivityWith technology changing rapidly and more and more roles relying on it, companies will need to prioritize upskilling and reskilling opportunities to keep their workforce up-to-date and competitive. “Companies will need to focus on their employees,” Khan said, noting that companies that don’t prioritize training are already experiencing higher employee turnover.Another way to curb turnover is to take a hard look at workplace policies and make sure they are serving employees personally to make the organization more attractive, whether that is through flexible hours, hybrid options, and even AI assistance, Khan says.Bersin’s organization just finished a report on the prevalence of the four-day workweek or work time reduction. “This is becoming a big deal because employees want flexibility. We’re finding that this idea creates job productivity, and forces companies to redesign jobs,” Bersin said. “There are things that we’re going to do that seem unnatural now to deal with this labor shortage. In the future they will be commonplace. That’s just one example.”The recent webinar featured Josh Bersin of the Josh Bersin Company and Sania Khan of Eightfold (photo by From Day One)This changing definition of productivity, a focus on “revenue per employee” rather than hours worked, will also serve working parents well, Khan says, as they manage to get more work done in a shorter period.“Hiring more people isn’t necessarily more productive,” Khan said. Companies will start to measure their success by how efficiently they are utilizing their human resources to generate revenue, a focus on output rather than the size of the team. “The companies that are really good at productivity are good at human resources. They’re good at training, facilitating workshops, redesigning jobs, flattening the corporate hierarchy, changing the role of leaders, and democratizing career development,” Bersin said. “These things that might have felt like ‘nice-to-haves’ ten years ago are becoming critical to becoming productive in this new economy.”Reimagining a Skills-based HierarchyIn the information age, employment has been less about job titles and more about the work, Bersin says, with employees taking on tasks and using their skills for objectives far beyond their stated job description in order to accomplish the mission of the day, week, or month. “These rigid job descriptions, titles, and hierarchies are getting in the way of reorganizing and redesigning the company to be more efficient,” Bersin said. He anticipates an existential change in which the titles of managers and corner office perks will be deprioritized in order to get the work done.In turn, companies will be looking less at what skills prospective employees currently have and instead look at adjacent skills that show an employee has the potential to be upskilled to be the right fit, Khan says. A focus on skills, says Bersin, can also pave the way for automation. Employees can be allowed to utilize the top of their skill set if their lower-level, less skilled tasks can be automated.“If you look at the needs of an organization, you can put employees in specific, goal-centric projects,” Khan said. “Instead of just having you siloed to one department, you can now move around to where you’re needed based on your skills.” This would also allow employees to be well-versed in the whole enterprise, rather than just one area, so both the individual and the organization benefit. And tools like Eightfold can use machine learning to help companies analyze what skill areas are lacking and fill those gaps with talent.How Leaders Can Adapt to the New Workforce“Leaders have to understand this labor shortage existentially and operate in a company where transformation and growth isn’t an episodic thing–it's never-ending,” Bersin said. “The new model of leadership is, ‘can you build a company that can move people around, that can develop people, that can hold people accountable, but also give them the opportunity to move when you need them into a new place?’ Those are different kinds of leadership skills.”And with the hierarchy flattening, workers need to be prepared to sometimes be leaders and other times be more subordinate depending on the current project. “We have to democratize the concept of leadership.” Those with flexibility and an appetite for innovation will be most attractive to potential employers, Khan adds.And in a talent-driven company, HR will become more and more essential, and will be called on to understand a wide variety of skills, roles, and changing corporate models to operate within skills-based planning, Bersin says. Gone are the days where HR will be associated with conflict resolution and complaints. Instead, HR is becoming a forward-thinking, technology, and data-driven career path.Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Eightfold, for sponsoring this webinar. You can read more from Josh Bersin on the post-industrial age here.Katie Chambers is a freelance writer and award-winning communications executive with a lifelong commitment to supporting artists and advocating for inclusion. Her work has been seen in HuffPost, Honeysuckle Magazine, and several printed essay collections, among others, and she has appeared on Cheddar News, iWomanTV, and CBS New York.

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