Equitable Hiring Practices
When I started my career in search on Bay Street, things were not as progressive, terms like “pedigree” were used daily, and I once apologized to a client for a candidate showing up in a brown suit 🤦♀️ It wasn’t the height of diversity in a physical form or a thought form. It’s changed a lot over the years but when I moved into Tech there was an opportunity. The landscape was wide open and I could create actual impact.
There was so much talk about diversity, but it always came down to “just hire more <BLANK> people”, which isn’t a solution to a real problem. That is when I decided to build and implement, wherever possible, an equitable hiring practice. Rather than hiring people b/c of their gender, skin colour, sexual orientation, we would focus on removing the barriers for under represented groups
To share all my strategies would probably be a book, so today I share with you my top tips to help you build an equitable hiring practice which will almost always result in a more diverse workforce, and we know without a shadow of a doubt that diverse teams build the best products.
🐢 Don’t try to change everything all in one day. You need your hiring teams to buy in, change slowly.
❓ Make acknowledging your own biases a good thing. Add a question to your scorecards “What could have been a personal bias in this interview that someone else should dig into further?”.
🎼 Use scorecards - we even make our partners use scorecards. I don’t want your opinion, I want facts (and you likely do too!). Scorecards keep things equitable from a question perspective but also from a feedback perspective. Having to remember your feedback a day later at a debrief isn’t going to reflect facts anymore, just opinions.
🇨🇦 Non Canadian experience is valid experience, so unless your candidates are required to have a specific license in Canada, their expertise from abroad counts, let them see that.
🏋️ Train your hiring teams - not just on interviewing but on small discriminatory things people don’t always realize, for example: If your candidate's first language isn’t English, remind the interviewer that they are likely translating in their heads first, have some patience for a slower conversation. If this candidate has expressed that they’ve encountered discrimination in a past company, give your interviewer some tips on how to create a safer feeling in this conversation.
🧑🏫 Stop thinking certain schools are better than others. There are more failed lawyers from Harvard than there are supreme court judges. You’re hiring the person, not the school.
🎙️ Finally, my favorite quote of all time - “Judge a person by their questions rather than their answers”. The best employees, especially for a start up are the ones that ask great questions, not the ones that think they know all the answers.
Originally post can be viewed here: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7087456094893006849/