Study: Talent leaders miss 'the simple things' to increase DEI

Dive Brief:

Despite ongoing interest in building a more diverse workforce, 51% of talent leaders surveyed by SmartRecruiters said they don’t have a process for setting diverse hiring goals.
Bias may be creeping into recruiting plans due to this neglect, the report noted. Only 31% of companies surveyed said they use structured interviews and 21% use assessments to evaluate candidate competencies. Internal applicants to jobs may also be an ignored aspect of diverse hiring; less than 15% of those surveyed said they scrub identifying factors from internal applicants to minimize bias from hiring managers.
"People are well-intentioned. They really want diversity," Jerome Ternynck, founder and CEO of SmartRecruiters, said in a statement. "But nothing’s changed in the last decade. Why? The reality is that companies are not doing the simple things."

Dive Insight:

Various studies have shown that while employers consider DEI goals important, the reality of company policy often falls short. Less than 2% of the survey base for a Salary.com survey published in June "said confidently that they were achieving DEI goals."

To advance DEI, companies need to make it a business function and not just an aspect of HR programming, a February report by Josh Bersin analysts found. Often, DEI is seen more as a compliance issue rather than a talent lever; "Roughly 80% of companies are just going through the motions and not holding themselves accountable," according to the report.

One way employers can hold themselves accountable is by analyzing how applicants move through the hiring process and seeing who drops out where and why. In an interview with HR Dive, one source noted that some employers lost candidates at the interview stage due to a lack of interviewers that looked like them; the top of the recruiting funnel can be an especially problematic area for employers, as traditional sources of hiring tend to be less diverse.

To see overall recruitment success, recruiters and hiring managers need training on language and context for why diverse recruiting matters, speakers said during a webinar hosted earlier this year; recruiters also need access to data that can help set specific goals, and employers need to set a specific starting line informed by that data to see any real change.