Retention & Hiring
Many organizations understand that building a workforce that reflects the full diversity of their community is both a business imperative and the right thing to do. But here is the truth that experienced practitioners will tell you: recruiting underrepresented talent into a workplace that is not yet ready to support them is not just ineffective, it can cause very negative experiences for your new employees. If employees from historically excluded communities arrive and find a culture that is not genuinely inclusive, they will leave. And they will tell others.
That is why the order matters: retention and culture come before recruiting. Build the house before you invite people in.
Assess your culture honestly. Before launching any recruitment effort aimed at diversifying your workforce, take an honest look at your current culture. Not the culture you aspire to, but the one that actually exists day to day.
Do all of your employees, including those from historically excluded communities, who are already in your organization feel genuinely included, valued, and positioned to advance? If not, understand why before you bring more people into the same environment.
What does your promotion and advancement data actually show? Are employees from underrepresented communities advancing at the same rates as their peers into management, into leadership, into decision-making roles? If not, that pattern will not fix itself through recruitment alone.
What do your exit interviews tell you? If you are not conducting them, start now. The employees who leave often carry the most important information about what your culture actually feels like from the inside.
How do employees describe their experience of psychological safety? Can they raise concerns, disagree with leadership, and be themselves at work without fear of professional consequence?
If this honest assessment reveals significant gaps, address them first. Recruiting into an unprepared culture does not solve a culture problem it compounds it.
Retention starts right away. The first ninety days of employment are where organizations win or lose talent. A thoughtful, genuinely inclusive onboarding experience is one of the highest-return investments your organization can make.
Make your culture and belonging commitments visible and concrete from the very first day. Introduce new employees to your inclusion team, your affinity groups, and your internal champions early.
Assign a dedicated onboarding buddy or mentor who can help new employees navigate the unwritten rules of your organizational culture, the things that are never in the employee handbook but matter enormously for feeling like you belong.
Check in deliberately and frequently during the first ninety days. Do not wait for a problem to surface. Ask directly: how are you feeling? What do you need? What is surprising or confusing about this environment?
Make sure new employees are not immediately asked to take on culture and inclusion labor if that is not part of their job description.
The manager relationship is everything. Research consistently shows that employees do not leave organizations; they leave managers. This is especially true for employees from historically excluded communities, who are acutely attuned to whether their direct supervisor genuinely advocates for them and creates conditions for them to do their best work.
Invest in manager training that goes beyond performance management basics. Managers need the skills to recognize and interrupt bias in their own decision-making, to give feedback equitably, to advocate for their team members' advancement, and to create genuine psychological safety in their teams.
Hold managers accountable for the retention and advancement of employees on their teams. If attrition is concentrated in certain teams, under certain managers, or to a specific underrepresented community in your workforce, that deserves direct attention.
Create channels for employees to provide upward feedback on their managers, and ensure those channels are genuinely protective of employees.
Recognize and reward managers who develop and retain talent. Make it clear that this is valued organizational behavior, not just a nice-to-have.
Address pay equity directly and proactively. Compensation inequity is one of the most concrete and damaging forms of exclusion. It is also among the most fixable, when organizations are willing to look at the data honestly.
Conduct a pay equity analysis disaggregated by race, gender, and other relevant identity dimensions. Do not wait for employees to raise it. If disparities exist, acknowledge them, develop a plan to address them, and communicate that plan transparently.
Post salary ranges in all job postings. Salary transparency is one of the most evidence-based tools for reducing pay inequity and improving trust with candidates from historically excluded communities.
Create transparent, documented criteria for compensation decisions, raises, and promotions. When the rules are clear and consistently applied, bias has fewer places to hide.
Audit your promotion patterns alongside your pay data. Pay inequity and promotion inequity are often two expressions of the same underlying dynamic and addressing one without the other produces incomplete results.
Build internal pathways before looking externally. Organizations often default to external recruitment when the talent they need is already inside. However, internal talent has often not been given opportunities to develop and grow.
Create visible, structured succession pathways for all employees. Professional development plans, stretch assignments, mentorship, and sponsorship should not be reserved for employees who are already on the fast track. Ensure all employees are accessing these resources.
Distinguish between mentorship and sponsorship and invest in both. Mentors offer guidance and support. Sponsors use their organizational influence to actively advocate for an employee's advancement. Employees from historically excluded communities are often over-mentored and under-sponsored. That imbalance has real consequences for who advances.
When leadership and management positions open up, ask honestly: is there internal talent who could step into this role with the right support? And if not, why not, and what does that tell you about your development practices?
Track internal mobility data alongside external hiring data. If employees from historically excluded communities are being hired at entry and mid-levels but not advancing, you have a pipeline that is leaking and recruitment will not fix it.
Build community relationships before you need them. More than 80% of professional networks are demographically homogeneous, which means passive recruiting will consistently reproduce the workforce you already have. Active, relationship-based recruitment in underrepresented communities is essential, but it requires investment and patience, and it cannot begin the moment you have an open position to fill.
Attend community events, professional gatherings, and cultural celebrations as a genuine participant
Partner with community organizations, professional networks, and educational institutions that serve historically excluded communities
Consider: Native Professionals Night, Oregon Professionals of Color, Say Hey / Partners in Diversity, LinkedIn community groups, HBCUs and minority-serving institutions, and similar community touchpoints
Write job descriptions that recruit, not filter. Job descriptions are frequently the first thing a candidate sees, and they are full of unintentional signals about who belongs and who does not.
Use welcoming, accessible language. Audit your descriptions for jargon, unnecessarily formal tone, and language patterns that research has shown to deter candidates from underrepresented communities from applying.
Lead with your culture, values, and commitment to belonging, not just the technical requirements of the role.
Post the salary range. Salary transparency reduces bias, increases applicant pool quality and diversity, and signals organizational integrity.
Examine every educational and credential requirement honestly. Ask: is this truly necessary for success in this role, or is it a proxy filter that disproportionately excludes qualified candidates who faced institutional barriers to formal education? Adding "or equivalent experience" is a small change with meaningful impact.
Use one of the available tools to audit your job descriptions for biased language before posting. Several free and low-cost options exist and are worth incorporating into your standard process.
Consider an anonymized resume review. Research consistently demonstrates that resumes with names associated with historically excluded communities receive significantly fewer callbacks than identical resumes with names associated with dominant groups. Anonymization is not a perfect solution, but it reduces one of the most well-documented points of bias in the hiring process.
Expect a longer recruitment process. Relationship-based recruiting takes more time and intentionality than posting a job and waiting. Budget in time, in staff capacity, and in patience. Focus on skills and potential, not just prior experience. Other experience is often as valuable as technical background, and for roles involving culture, community, and organizational relationships, it is frequently more so. Create an interview experience that reflects your values. The interview process itself sends powerful signals about your organizational culture and candidates are often reading those signals carefully.
Share interview questions with candidates in advance. This levels the playing field for candidates who may be less familiar with formal interview culture or need more processing time.
Assess the composition of your hiring panel deliberately. A panel that does not reflect the diversity of the community you are recruiting from sends an immediate message. Be intentional about who is in the room, and be careful not to place the full burden of representation on one or two employees from historically excluded communities, who may feel pressure to perform rather than to evaluate authentically.
Provide bias awareness training for all hiring panel members. Structured, informed hiring processes consistently produce better outcomes for both organizations and candidates.
What to do when something goes wrong. Even with the best preparation, there will be moments when your culture falls short of what you promised a new employee. Someone joins and finds that the reality does not match the narrative. They may begin to disengage, struggle, or quietly start looking elsewhere. If this happens, do not minimize it or wait for it to resolve on its own. The goal is not a perfect culture before you hire; it is an honest culture that is genuinely committed to growing.
Address it directly and quickly. Have an honest conversation about what the employee is experiencing. Listen without defensiveness.
Use it as organizational intelligence. One person's experience of a gap between your stated culture and your actual culture is information you need. Take it seriously.
Make visible changes where possible and communicate. Employees who see their feedback translated into action are far more likely to stay and invest in the organization's growth.
Acknowledge when you have asked someone to carry more than they should have. Be honest about it. And do the organizational work to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.
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