To Address Their ‘Diversity’ Problem, Organizations Should Stop Prioritizing Hiring and Focus on Retention and Organizational Culture
We are in a political moment where organizations are looking to increase their investments in diversity, equity, and inclusion. Predictably, these initiatives often involve looking at hiring practices, particularly recruitment and retention of staff of color. And while it is important to examine practices at all stages, many organizations get caught up in hiring and recruitment and drop the ball on retention and promotion. Worse still, they may never examine the relationship between retention and organizational culture.
The focus on recruitment and hiring makes sense: the fixes are concrete, tangible, and fairly easy to implement so long as you are serious about it. To the extent that fostering relationships with diverse organizations and schools can be effective, it will be. But a focus on recruitment and hiring will not in and of itself solve an organization’s diversity problem. And for many organizations the problems run much deeper than who is in the candidate pool.
Organizations — often consumed with a tokenistic approach to diversity — emphasize the recruitment of Black employees and employees of color while remaining willfully blind to the fact that the need for more talent often stems from high turnover rates due to a toxic culture. The fact of the matter is that Black employees and employees of color often have fundamentally different experiences than white employees within the same organization. These different experiences can directly translate to differences in tenure and turnover within an organization.
If you are continuously hiring BIPOC talent, yet your organization’s demographics are not shifting, there is a bigger issue. Similarly, if you have Black employees but are still having issues recruiting more into the organization, I would reflect and assess the experience that your current employees are having, and start there (i.e., bolstering equity and inclusion). The best way to recruit into an organization is positive employee experiences. A positive review, even from an employee that has left the organization, can be worth more than any recruitment call or interview experience. But that is a question of organizational culture that cannot be solved through tinkering with policies around hiring.
What we know about social networks is that Black people know other Black people, and people of color know other people of color. But if BIPOC employees are having a terrible experience within an organization, why would they stake their reputation and relationships to refer people that they know and love to come work in a place that is completely toxic and unsupportive? The answer is they won’t.
