Recruitment Changes Who Enters. Culture Decides Who Stays
About this Episode
In this episode of DEI Will Not DIE, Bree explores recruitment as an important lever for creating diverse, equitable and inclusive workplaces. While recruitment is often where organisations start, we need to remember that if we don’t make systemic changes throughout the whole organisation, we create environments where a diverse workforce might not feel supported.
Bree covers where bias and barriers actually show up across the recruitment process, why awareness alone won’t change outcomes, and what can happen when organisations ‘fix’ their hiring process without addressing their systems, culture and leadership progression pipelines.
What You'll Learn
Why recruitment is only one piece of the DEI puzzle, not the whole solution
Why it’s so important to not just create change in recruitment, but to create systemic change across the organisation
The importance of measuring promotion systems and how bias can impact staff retention
Practical ways to shift recruitment from subjective judgement to evidence-based assessment
Resources Mentioned
Keep Learning & Connect With Bree
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[00:00:00] Is DEI dead? Not even close. I'm Bree Gorman and this is DEI will not die the podcast for people doing the real work of inclusion. Whether you are leading a team shaping DEI strategy or just trying to make change that lasts. You're in the right place. We will cut through the fluff and dig into practical insights that will help you lead with clarity, courage, and impact.
Want more tools and support, head to breegorman.com.
I've got an exciting topic for you today. The topic is recruitment, using recruitment as a lever. To create diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplaces an important lever, definitely. All that needs to be done. Definitely not. It's one [00:01:00] piece, right? It's one piece of the puzzle. And I find in conversations around DEI, sometimes we get a little fixated on whether something works or not.
And the reality is, particularly when we're talking about systems change, it's that there's. Of different systems that we need to change to create more inclusive and equitable workplaces. Lots of them, and they're all important. No one process, no one policy, no one program is going to create an inclusive and equitable workplace.
This work is so multifaceted, it is complex, and each little piece in the puzzle, I like to think about it. DEI is not one of our. Kids jigsaw puzzles where there's about 10 pieces, big pieces that all fit together very easily. It's more like one of the big complicated thousand piece, 2000 piece jigsaw puzzles where they've deliberately made the [00:02:00] picture to have not a lot of difference so that the pieces are really hard to put in the right place and fix together.
This is really complex work. Recruitment is a lever along with a whole bunch of other things. And what I want to talk about today is a little bit about how we use recruitment and how we improve our recruitment processes to create more inclusive and equitable workplaces, but also what else needs to be happening at the same time to make those recruitment changes create any real impact.
It's not impact when we just hire one or two people who are perhaps a little bit different from the majority of people in the organisation, that's not change. I hear a lot of people talking recently about, that representation doesn't equal change, and I was fortunate last week to be part of a intersectionality.
Training program, not that I was delivering this time. I [00:03:00] got to be the student and I got to sit and listen to some really wonderful practitioners. I will put their details in the show notes. Veronica Pardo is one of those. Georgia PRUs, I believe. I'll definitely put, you know what my ADHD brain is like.
I'll definitely put their details in the show notes, but they were talking very strongly about this. That good DEI work starts with systems change and is not just focused on representation, 'cause just counting bums on seats, counting the number of people we have in an organisation who are women or people of color or.
Disabled or LGBTQA plus, that's not DEI work. That's just one element of it is representation. The rest of it is about how we create spaces where people who aren't of the majority, who perhaps have marginlised or underrepresented backgrounds can influence and impact the organisation, can [00:04:00] thrive within that organisation, can be, at their best, whatever that is, and sometimes at their worst than that.
That's okay, that we create an inclusive environment, right? Otherwise, we just see turnover, we just see people come in and out. We don't actually see any true impact or change. We don't see the decisions that we're making change if we're not truly incorporating that diverse representation that we've.
Created or we are creating in our organisations. I've realised I did not acknowledge country yet. I do wanna acknowledge as always, the Wadderang people whose land that I live, work, and play on. I had the, the privilege and the discomfort of sitting through a screening of genocide in the wildflower state.
Now, if you haven't seen this film, it's on SBS On Demand, which is an Australian free streaming platform. So please jump on and watch that film, it's a brilliant film [00:05:00] about the stolen generations here in Australia. The harm that was done and the ongoing harm that is occurring because of, a state sanctioned genocide.
So please watch the film if you haven't already. For me, it really did bring my heart fully into this conversation. I'm an advocate, i'm there. But this film took it another step and another, deeper level than what I had learned about before. So that was a bit of a word salad, but please go and see the film.
I am still, it's about four days since I saw it and I still am a bit less for words about it, so I'd really encourage you to go and watch it. So that's called Genocide in the Wildflower State. And again, I'll put a link to that in the show notes. So we wanna talk about recruitment, and firstly, let's talk about how it can be positive.
What are some of the things we can do to our recruitment process that [00:06:00] will drive a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace? And maybe if I talk about one of the activities that I like to do in my inclusive leadership workshop is to actually look at the recruitment process from start to finish.
So all of the different steps in the process, now that changes from organisation to organisation, but certainly in this country we have a pretty standard process. And I think there is a brilliant exercise that we should all be doing in our workplaces where we go through each step and we think about where are the biases and the barriers and the opportunities for discrimination in that particular step of the recruitment process.
Now we can do that through a lens where we might just sit with our leadership team or the HR recruitment team and do it. But of course we only do that in a really meaningful way when we engage across the organisation and give and hear from different [00:07:00] voices about their experiences of the recruitment process and what they've observed and noticed.
And, when we get a good, wide ranging. Diverse set of voices to contribute. We can start to notice where the barriers are. I was really fortunate to do a project with an organisation once where we did this and we did it through consultation. So as an external, I ran some focus groups and some interviews with people who had been through the recruitment process recently, maybe they were a hiring manager on a process.
The HR team managed to get a couple of people who, were unsuccessful through their recruitment process and got to hear from them a nice challenging project, but a really enlightening one. And there were some things that came out of that. With that were really great, easy changes to make to the recruitment process that could have a really huge difference on the experiences of people in that process, which matters because we know that [00:08:00] regardless if someone's successful or unsuccessful in your recruitment process, they talk about it.
Talk about that to their friends who might be applying for roles in the future or not applying based on what they say. So improving their experience, but also improving the outcomes and hopefully diversifying the outcomes. So that's one thing that we can definitely do with the recruitment process.
People always jump to things like, oh, we need to run unconscious bias training for our hiring managers. Oh gosh, yes, I think there is value in raising understanding of hiring managers around bias. Yet the research has shown us that this doesn't necessarily change the outcome. Sometimes when people learn about bias, they then become more bias.
It's an awful, unfortunate event, but that seems to be our number one go-to. Method for improving the recruitment [00:09:00] process, and it's not, that's not systems change. Systems change is identifying where the barriers and the biases happen and doing something proactively to change them. So let me give an example.
It might be around the types of questions that you're asking and how you're framing them, whether you are giving somebody a couple of days to think on the questions before they show up to the recruitment process. It might be around the assessment matrix, the rubric that you're using to, measure the performance of candidates across that process.
Sometimes the bias is embedded in the selection criteria to start with, right? So when we say high level communication skills as an organisation, how do we define that? What do we mean by that? Because I can tell you, you've got a bunch of hiring managers who think if somebody doesn't make regular and consistent eye contact, then their communication skills are poor.
[00:10:00] Rather than they might be neurodivergent and they actually might be fantastic for the job and have very high level communication skills. They just communicate in perhaps a slightly different way. So hopefully I'm giving you a few examples there where we are looking at the way the system changes, and so if we're going to follow this example, high level communication skills.
As part of our selection criteria let's have it very well defined for our recruitment panel, what that means, what are we looking for, and how are we testing that in this recruitment process? So if high level communication skills for this particular role actually means producing documents that clearly articulate the outcome of a particular.
Project process. I don't know, making it up. If that's the type of communication skills we're looking for in this role, then maybe we set them a work sample a week prior and [00:11:00] actually get them to do the job so that when we get the output, we can go, oh yeah, look, they've communicated this pretty well, which is exactly what we're gonna ask of them in the role, rather than making some random assessment as to whether somebody spoke well in an interview.
We also know that really negatively impacts people who might have English as a second or third language who are being marked down on the communication skills criteria, which is meaning they miss out on the role. They could be fantastic at the role, they just perhaps didn't use the exact right grammar, and somebody who on the interview panel was a little bit finicky about it, and so that got them marked down.
So let's be really conscious about what we're marking people on and where barriers and biases might come into play. So I'm not gonna continue to go through a bunch of examples about recruitment, but I think you get the picture that well. I hope you get the picture that I'm [00:12:00] trying to frame, is that recruitment can be a good lever to create diverse, equitable, inclusive workplaces if we use that process in the right way, and if we really take a deep dive into the process and how it's impacting potential candidates and the outcomes that we're getting.
So that's the good part. Now, let's think about what the tension is here though, and where sometimes A DEI work goes a little bit awry. If you redesign your recruitment process, but you leave everything else untouched, then you might actually end up causing more harm than do good. So you've now recruited people who come from marginlised or underrepresented backgrounds, and yet the way their performance is measured.
There are opportunities for promotion, the behaviors of people around them, the decision making processes in the [00:13:00] organisation. If none of those things have also been optimised for an inclusive and equitable workplace, then something doesn't fit here. And we could be bringing people into a space that just doesn't work for them, that actually, in the worst case scenario, ends up causing them harm.
So at the same time, recruitment important, what we also need to be doing is. Yes. Looking at how we measure performance, what is valued here? I have a question in the surveys that I run sometimes that says, what do you think are the most valued traits, characteristics, or behaviors in this organisation?
This is such a revealing question because yes, it's just measuring perception. What are people's perceptions of what's valued, but it's really interesting to map the outcomes from that to your values. And what you think you're rewarding. If you see quite a mismatch, you can see places where you might need to do a bit of [00:14:00] work.
Now, I haven't gone off the topic. It is still on topic. We're measuring performance, right? Do our performance metrics take into account whether somebody's demonstrating inclusive leadership skills as a leader? Firstly, we'd hope when we did that recruitment process review that we would've introduced into leadership roles, a way of assessing inclusive leadership behaviors.
Which you can do, and then as that person is then progressing and having their performance measured, we are measuring how they're demonstrating those inclusive behaviors. We're checking in on people. We're finding out what it is that they've done this year that's actually led towards a more inclusive and equitable workplace.
We also need to think about how we make decisions. Whose voice is getting heard the most? Who's getting involved in the. Outside meeting conversations, we all know we do this. We have the meeting with generally the right people in the meeting that need to be [00:15:00] there to contribute. And then afterwards there's the more like informal casual conversations about the decision that needs to be made and who's getting involved in them.
So what I'm getting to here is the culture around governance and decision making processes and how structured we are being about how decisions get made. What about complaints? If we bring somebody in who's more likely to experience harassment, bullying, sexual harassment, and our complaints process sucks.
Then we may absolutely be in a situation where harm is caused and also that person leaves because it's easier to quite quit than it is to tackle a complaints process that wasn't person centered. It wasn't designed to put the person who's harmed at the center of the process. I'm just providing a few little examples there where we need to look at the structures and systems within the organisation.[00:16:00]
To allow us to make the most of any improvements that we make to our recruitment process from a staff wellbeing perspective, as well as from an organisational perspective and being able to actually experience the benefits of having an inclusive and equitable workplace. Let's just talk a little bit about promotions, because this really matters as well.
I find when I'm working with clients, it is easy to get data around recruitment than it is around promotions, and it shouldn't be. We should absolutely know who's getting promoted and why. In our organisation we should have transparency around direct appointments, which are quite often promotions. We should be tracking that data.
We should be understanding what it is that's getting people ahead in our organisation because that's all internal information that we have. Once we know that is another system within [00:17:00] our organisation, and then we can work to tailor that system so that it is providing fair across the board.
Now, some people will say, oh, this is where, you can't get a promotion anymore. You can't get into leadership unless you're a woman. So this is where some backlash can occur if we don't do this. Backlash is gonna occur anyway, but more significant backlash. Employees generally don't think promotion processes are equitable or fair.
Understanding why they don't think that is important, and also looking at the process itself and understanding where the barriers are most often. As I say, it's an informal process and therefore it's open to bias, lots of it. Informal processes are always open to lots of bias, so maybe it's about creating some systems and structure around promotions and at the same time tracking the data.
So I'd say, if I wanted to summarise what I'm trying to say here, recruitment is a gateway to creating more [00:18:00] diverse organisations, but if we don't have the systems and the structures in place within our organisation already to support people when they come in. That increase in diversity could be temporary or it could be a in and out cycle where people are entering the organisation, leaving new people entering, leaving.
So increased turnover of people from marginlised and underrepresented backgrounds, it doesn't work on its own as a lever. Representation is in our only way to create change. It's just one piece in that puzzle, and I think that's important for us to keep in mind. Question that people often ask me in this space is if we start with like where do we start?
We can't do everything at once. And I'd say improving your recruitment process is gonna take you years. So you start that and improving the culture of your organisation and the other systems within your organisation is always gonna take years. [00:19:00] So we start that as well. We're just stepping out the changes, right?
We've gotta, that's where it comes to strategy. That's when it comes to our work plans and how we're going to step out our journey towards creating inclusion. Because this is not a three month job, this is years and sometimes decades of change that's gonna happen and occur, so starting.
The systems change across the board from the beginning is definitely much preferred than trying to get one aspect of it perfect before you start on the next. 'cause that's not gonna really shift at all, so you need to go at the same time. So hopefully that episode's been a bit helpful. Happy to answer any of your questions.
We'll put in the show notes, also a couple of blogs that I've got around recruitment and some things, and please reach out to me if you think that I could be any further help to you or your organisation. I will catch you next time.
That's it for [00:20:00] today's episode of DEI will not die. Want more resources and support to do the work why don't you visit breegorman.com and don't forget to follow or share this episode with someone who cares, and maybe also someone who should.