This One Trick Will Help You Hire More People of Color

As a diversity trainer, one of the classic questions I get hired to tackle is, “How do I hire more [insert minority group]?” Usually, the question concerns hiring more people of color or women but it can easily apply to any other marginalized population in this society. It’s been fascinating to observe, project after project, clients who believe that hiring a more diverse staff involves some complicated and recondite proprietary method. After all, if it were that easy, every organization would be fulfilling its diversity goals and touting its achievements, right? The fact that more businesses haven’t done so must be proof that hiring more diverse people is actually a difficult process.

Let me fill you in on a little secret: it’s not. In fact, it is profoundly simple. And yes, I did name this article in the style of those spam ads you see on websites that promise you an easy solution to losing weight, stopping your face from aging, and getting cheap car insurance. Of course, the article’s title is being facetious and sarcastic, but hiring a more diverse staff really is that easy. You ready? The trick to hiring more people of color… is to just hire more people of color! If you want more women in your company, hire more women! If you want more women of color, hire more women of color!

I can already imagine the look of alarm on your face and am anticipating your response. But we can’t just hire more people of color, you say. We need to make sure that they’re qualified. Here’s my question to you about the whole idea of qualification: how many white people have you hired who turned out to be unqualified or less than satisfactory? And how many men have you hired that had fewer qualifications on paper than desired but whom you hired anyway because of “a good feeling about him”? Many companies and NGOs hire white men using a nonexistent or lax standard of qualification but suddenly become preoccupied with hiring only the most qualified people when considering candidates of color and woman candidates.

There are, of course, many dimensions to hiring more diverse people. You need to implement an affirmative search process that involves advertising open positions in non-traditional (hint: non-white, non-male) media. You need to broaden your conceptualization of what constitutes a qualified candidate to include unconventional or non-academic experiences. You also need to make structural changes to your organization such as potentially providing day care for mothers and fathers, LGBT-friendly health insurance plans, and other actions that contribute to an inclusive and supportive work environment. But these are more tangible actions that require research and planning and for which most institutions hire diversity trainers to address. The problem I’m addressing here is more psychological. It’s the issue of subconsciously seeing a white candidate or man candidate as more qualified than a candidate of color or woman candidate of comparable credentials. There is no complicated method. The solution is simple but profound because it requires a lot of internal work recognizing and unlearning your implicit biases.

I’ll leave you with an actual trick to overcome your implicit biases in case you have little confidence that you can work through them. Ask someone in your office to black out the name and any signifier of race or gender on all of the resumes before you review them. I can assure you that you’ll be pleased to find that the percentage of people of color and women in your “interview” pile will have gone up and, more surprisingly, the percentage of white men in your “discard” pile will have gone up as well. Happy hiring!

Working for Equity in Organizations Is A Lot Like Community Organizing

I have worked with a few clients over the years who hire me basically to give them a magic bullet that will help their organization become diverse and equitable once and for all time. Very often, they come to me with very specific incidents that they’re recovering from and want very tangible instructions on how to handle similar incidents in the future. They appreciate the theories of diversity and social justice, but what they really crave is methods that will guarantee them success in bringing about justice the next time.

The problem with the need for guaranteed methods is that we lead lives in the context of power. Specifically, power hierarchies. We all live in a web of social and professional relationships in which we have bosses and boards that have more power than we do and we are bosses and board members to someone else. In the context of power hierarchies, building diversity and equity in your organization is a lot like community organizing. It is not at all like taking a pill and thinking that you’ve been cured. Building equity takes months and years and happens one changed mind at a time.

The biggest obstacle I’ve heard from my clients is that they individually, even as a director, have limited powers and they anguish over it. They say, if only they had full power to implement changes, it would be so easy. Well, the trouble with that sentiment is that no one ever has all the power and changes are never easy. Waiting for the day that you have the power to create change only impedes your actually doing what you can today. The illusion of control is more often than not a person’s biggest barrier, not their bosses.

In my years as a community organizer working in environmental justice, LGBT, and community development organizations, I witnessed firsthand organizing as the practice of persistence. Organizing utilizes the power of voice and persistently deploys it to fight for justice at every opportunity with the faith that one day a significant change will come about from all of the years of hard work. Building equity in organizations is a lot like that. You raise your voice for diversity whenever and wherever your position allows – at board meetings, grant proposal reviews, staff meetings, public events, etc. If you expect to change an entire body of people overnight, you will only suffer from burnout. Instead, you can keep raising your voice at every opportunity knowing that one day, you will change one person’s mind, and then a second person, and then a third person until the message becomes a mainstay of your organization and on which your organization operates.

As a social justice trainer and organizational consultant, I give my clients the theories, concepts, and tools to start their efforts. But it is the clients themselves who will need to do most of the hard work day in and day out.