Retention & Hiring

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Many people understand that having people of color in your company is critical to building a diverse environment and shifting culture. However, hiring People of Color can be potentially harmful if you are not ensuring your workplace culture is positioned to retain, empower, and ensure that POC can thrive in your company.  Your good intent could backfire if People of Color feel harmed and isolated and don’t want to work for your company. That’s why retention and an inclusive environment come FIRST.   

Helpful reminders:  

Don’t recruit unless you can retain.  Many times, businesses seek to diversify their workforce by simply recruiting new individuals into the organization. Recruiting candidates of color is great, but unless a business does the work to create an inclusive work environment, they will struggle to retain the talent they recruit!

If staff of color leave your business, provide an opportunity for an exit interview to understand what the staff’s experience was at your business, and why they are leaving. 

Create succession plans, where staff of color have access to professional development opportunities so that as management and leadership positions become available, they are positioned to grow within your organization. 

Track your workforce disaggregated by race and gender so the tenure of People of Color in staff and management positions is visible and you can identify disparities in pay (and implement processes to close the disparities, if they exist). 

Provide mentorship to staff of color. Despite representing about 18% of the U.S. population,  women of color represented only 4% of C-Level positions in 2018, falling far below white men (68%) and white women (19%).  

Don’t have a superficial external makeover. You can be honest about your intent and your journey of DEI work. Don’t make your company out to be more advanced on racial equity than it is, because that can be misleading. Instead, talk about your intentions and your journey. Let folks of color know that you are on the path and they will be joining a workplace where learning is going on. Then they can prepare for the reality of DEI work.  

Make sure you are in community – make time for recruitment 

More than 80 percent of social networks are racially homogenous. One national survey found that men of color were 26 percent less likely to receive referrals to jobs than white men, and women of color were 35 percent less likely to receive a job referral. 

This means that you need to get out into the community with targeted recruitment if you want to diversify your workforce. 

• Native Professionals Night 

• LinkedIn Connections 

• Oregon Professionals of Color 

• Say Hey – Partners in Diversity 

Make your job description a recruitment device 

• Folks who don’t see themselves as qualified enough won’t apply. Often, due to internalized racial oppression, folks of color and particularly women of color might be made to feel they aren’t as qualified as their white counterparts.  

• Talk about workplace flexibility 

• Talk about vision, mission, values of the job   

• Post the pay range in the job description 

• Utilize tools to review your job descriptions for bias. 

• Consider how important factors like educational attainment are. Is this really necessary or a deal breaker? Many BIPOC may experience institutional barriers to higher education so you can add things like ‘or equivalent experience’ to create more access

• When reviewing resumes and applications, consider doing a review where names and identifying details are removed: 

• It is impossible to completely remove bias, so it can be helpful to create processes to reduce opportunities for bias. 

• Researchers produced studies representing more than 54,000 applications and found that “white applicants receive 36% more callbacks than equally qualified African Americans” while “[w]hite applicants receive on average 24% more callbacks than Latinos.” 

Expect longer to recruit  

• Court candidates; be targeted in your recruitment to go to candidates of color 

• Seek candidates that have the right skills to train / not necessarily most direct experience 

Get rid of un-needed barriers 

• Lived experience can often be just as or more important than technical experience 

• How important is that college degree for the position?  

 Best practices for Interviewing 

• Share interview questions with candidates to review in advance of the interview 

• Interview at least two candidates of color  

• Why? A Harvard Business Review study showed that when there was only one minority candidate in a pool of four finalists, their odds of being hired were statistically zero.  The odds of hiring a minority were 193.72 times greater if there were at least two minority candidates in the finalist pool. 

• Review the makeup of your hiring panel – is it representative and inclusive? As you consider who to have on the hiring panel, be cautious not to tokenize your staff of color. 

• Engage your hiring panel in Bias Awareness Training. Here are some tips from the City’s Bureau of Human Resources