Interviewing Diverse Talent-What Employers May Neglect to Consider.
By: Lusik Gasparyan
Tags: Hiring, Diversity And Inclusion, Interview, HR, Training

You’ve identified the need to diversify your staff, you’ve spent time and money recruiting employees, and now they are here. What is next?

Let’s back up. While the recruitment process is going on, you and your company have a lot of work to do before you can create an inclusive environment for the incoming diverse talent, even before they come in for an interview.

Each company has its own style of interviewing, for some, a Zoom chat is enough. For others, it is a 6–8 step process where the job candidate meets different team members at each step. Once I even had a 15-minute phone interview, which led to nowhere. Regardless of the differences in the interview process from company to company, let’s instead focus on who is interviewing and how it might go right, or very wrong from a diversity and inclusion standpoint.

Will the interviewer avoid pronouncing the name of the job candidate because they are not confident with the pronunciation? Or even worst, not call a candidate for an interview because they have a name that the interviewer cannot pronounce. Chief People Officer and Host of Not the HR Lady Tara Furiani created a poll on LinkedIn asking, “Have you ever not called someone for a position because you didn’t know how to pronounce their name?” The poll had two choices to pick from — yes and no. Out of everyone who voted, 39 people admitted that they did avoid calling job candidates whose names they did not know how to pronounce.

Does your HR representative or recruiter know to not misgender candidates in the recruitment/interview process after gender pronouns have been identified? Can they answer questions regarding gender-neutral restrooms or what the plan for that would look like once the pandemic has ended and most companies have stopped remote work? What accommodations is your company prepared to provide to a candidate with a disability? Are people within your company educated as to what a “reasonable accommodation” is? In the post-Covid19 world, would a candidate with disabilities be able to continue working remotely? What technological support can you provide to the candidate to be able to participate in company meetings? Does your recruiter know the difference between “African-American” and “Black” and to not use them interchangeably? And please tell me, they will not confuse the different Asian countries or make comments about the job seeker’s accent. As someone with an accent, trust me on this one. I really hope they won’t say they met an Armenian before, their neighbor’s boyfriend, once they find out I am from Armenia.

Lots of questions, but what are the solutions?

Ideally, all HR representatives and recruiters would take a few diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) courses. LinkedIn offers many DEI courses. Each company can make taking and passing these courses a requirement for employees in their HR department. It is more costly to the company to not have an HR Department and recruiters who have an understanding of cultural humility, empathy, and DEI than it would be to pay for a few professional development opportunities. There are countless summits throughout the year, which feature amazing lectures and ideas from industry leaders. Especially this year, as most of these are free, and almost all are remote. These summits are great networking and learning opportunities for the company. Here are a few of my favorites from this year: Belonging at Work, The Future for Us Virtual Assembly — A Conference for Womxn of Color at Work, and Diversity Reboot 2020. Here are a few upcoming free trainings: Introspective Dialogue on Racism and Equity-based Interventions and Entrepreneurship and Racial Equity.

When selecting recruiters, it is also crucial to know what their experience is like with DEI and working with diverse talent. I personally know some fantastic recruiters that are also DEI community leaders.

If you already have a DEI Director or Manager, they should be part of the recruitment/interviewing process. If you don’t but have functional Employee Resource Groups, getting representatives from each group involved in the interviewing process would not only help the job candidate see how much the organization values its employees but also help the employees feel valued by being part of the decision-making process.

I am not suggesting taking decision-making powers from the HR Department, but the diversity, equity, and inclusion concept is about getting more voices involved and not hoarding power with leadership.

The goal with diversifying staff is not to just get people in the door but also to retain them. If you have the correct inclusive environment set up from the beginning, you are showing your new employee your commitment to them. After all, think about the resources and time you waste starting over every time you lose yet another candidate and another employee.