Taking a Strategic Approach to Recruiting a Diverse Workforce

Recruiting a diverse workforce is about a lot more than deciding where to post jobs and source candidates. As the figure below illustrates, the full-stream process from sourcing through onboarding is implemented by people who are supported by your organization's policies, strategies, practices, and systems.

Successful recruiting outcomes require:

• Truly inclusive policies, strategies, and practices.
• Recruiters, interviewers, hiring managers, and leaders with well-developed intercultural expertise who consequently will tend to think, act, and make hiring decisions in an authentic, inclusive, and culturally-competent way.
• Training and tools to help develop culturally-competent staff.
• HR systems that make it easy to track and manage each step of the recruiting process.

A systems approach helps ensure success. Typical steps include:

•  Inclusion and culture analyses of:
  • The sourcing and selection process including the training and tools for people doing the sourcing and selection work (e.g. the recruiters, interviewers, and hiring managers). 
  •  The career and diversity sections of the organization’s website.
• Survey or interview the people doing the sourcing and selection work to determine how they think about and manage their work regarding diversity and cultural difference.
•  Measure the recruiters’, interviewers', and hiring managers’ mindset regarding diversity and cultural difference using the Intercultural Development Inventory®.
•  Analyze applicant flow and workforce data including hires, promotions, and separations.

This provides the basis for a comprehensive focused strategy and action plan that addresses the full-stream recruiting process. As appropriate to the organization, the strategy should consider reputation, external relationships with associations, schools, and key influencers, external and internal sourcing, web presence, applicant flow management, selection, and onboarding.

Engaging Your CEO and Senior Leadership in D&I Strategies and Training

In this issue we continue our focus on engaging your CEO and senior leadership in diversity and inclusion. We also address some reader questions about building inclusion.

Let's say you have a 15-minute meeting with your CEO. You want to provide a progress briefing and obtain a full hour for a follow-up session to obtain CEO ownership of and engagement in updating your D&I strategic plan. Which opening line is more likely to succeed:

• "Diversity and inclusion are morally important and essential to our business success."
  
  
• "We have absolutely got to continue growing our business despite the intense competition and the growing diversity and complexity of our markets, business partners, customers, and workforce."

The second choice will catch the attention of your CEO and senior leaders! They tend to be keenly interested in anything that helps grow the business. So you need to speak their language and come across as focused on this too! Apply MDB Group’s Business-Aligned® D&I planning to design your conversation. As the figure below shows, start with your CEO's key growth goals and initiatives.

Then apply a workforce and workplace lens to business growth. Determine specific workforce and workplace changes that will help grow the business. Workforce goals are about "who we are" which is about workforce diversity. Workplace goals are about "how we work together" which is about workplace inclusion. Intercultural expertise provides the foundation for achieving these goals. For a brief introduction to these methods or an in-depth learning series, visit the MDB Group D&I Media Center.

Building Inclusion

After the article "Mindset Matters" in the April 2011 newsletter some readers asked that we say more about the relationship between intercultural expertise, also called cultural competence, and inclusion. We're happy to do so!

In our experience, almost all organizations say they want a more-inclusive workplace. Some can define business-based reasons for why this is important and what it would look like. Almost no organizations achieve anything close to "full inclusion." Why?

Inclusion is about "how" we work together to harness our collective knowledge, experience, and perspectives to grow the business as illustrated in the figure below. Inclusion is all about how we behave or act when working with colleagues and customers of increasingly-diverse cultural backgrounds.

Building a more-inclusive workplace requires changes in behavior from everyone in the organization. Accountability plays a role, through organization values and a well-designed performance management process. Mindset about diversity and cultural difference plays an even stronger role! Consider three alternatives:

• If I think you are bad or wrong we probably won't be able to work well together.
• If I think you are OK and that we have exactly the same core beliefs and values we can work together well if you conform to my expectations.
• If I think you and I each have different and valuable perspectives and that it is really important that we achieve a deep mutual understanding of each other it's more likely that we both will feel great about working together. We will both feel fully included.

These alternatives reflect three mindsets about diversity and cultural difference (Polarization, Minimization, and Acceptance of the Intercultural Development Continuum), or three different levels of intercultural expertise. So, developing intercultural expertise increases the likelihood that we will be able to work together really well and build true inclusion. For more, visit building inclusion.

Mindset Matters

Mindset Matters in many ways. For the D&I CDO / practitioner. For the CEO and senior leadership. For all the employees of your organization. D&I planning must start from your organization's business strategic plan and key objectives. The figure below shows how applying a workforce and workplace lens to your business typically determines that a particular mix of The PICAS Factors© is essential to growing the business.

We are experiencing unprecedented ongoing increases in the cultural diversity of the workforce, customers, suppliers, and regulators. Customers may be consumers or the decision makers in other organizations that purchase your products and services.

So, as the chart shows, communicating and working really well with, and understanding the needs of, people of diverse cultural backgrounds is crucial to your organization's business! (This is a great practical definition of intercultural competence or expertise.) So, Mindset Matters for everyone in the organization!

It is probably no surprise that research and experience show we all over-estimate how well we do this. This illustrates the exceptional importance of intercultural expertise to business success. To read more, visit the dedicated section of our website at intercultural expertise.