Using data to hire and retain women of color is crucial for diversity, equity, and inclusion. Considering that post-pandemic, there is a need to actively work to not only hire but create a sense of belonging and inclusion so more diverse women stay, data is the way to go. Here are some things you should be looking for in your data to help create an impact on your organization’s recruitment and retention strategy:
Tailoring Onboarding Process:
The first ninety days of employment are when employers lose their diverse employees the most. What the companies should be focusing on the most is tailoring their onboarding processes. The easiest and most effective way to do it is to present new hires with distinctively tailored and customized items that can help them feel noticed within the organization. These could be a nameplate, shirt, or any other company-branded item that is specific to the employee. Personalizing experiences can help create a sense of belonging.
The companies can have employees fill out questionnaires during the onboarding process that indicates their likes and preference. This can later help in offering them merchandise specific to their culture, gender, or particular conditions. When an employer does this, the new employee feels comfortable because they feel noticed, seen, and heard. Another crucial thing during the onboarding process is ensuring that everyone knows how to pronounce the new employee’s name correctly. They could be asked to enunciate their name in the first meeting, which can be recorded, and later shared with everyone else. Asking a new employee if they have a nickname or not just because their name may be difficult to others to pronounce is disrespectful.
Finally, pair the new employee with a mentor or tenured employee who can help them during the initial days. This person can help them figure out online or digital workplace if the role is remote or work from home. The mentor would help acclimate them to the slack community, the Microsoft community protocols, and the other tech protocols specific to the team. In other settings or in the physical workplace, the mentor can identify facilities that the company provides that they can benefit from. The mentor can get help from ERGs here. These actions may help the new hire feel a personal connection and comfort with the person who is helping them figure out the new role and the company.
Start With The Referral Rates:
The referral rates tell a lot about the companies that are interested in creating a more diverse workforce. Look at the referral pool of your current and past employees by demographics, gender, ethnicity, and race among other factors. Data still supports that nepotism is still prevalent in companies and network privilege still stands for white employees. Nearly 50% of all referrals are white; 60% of all of those are men, meaning nearly 30% of all referrals are white men. When a third of all referrals come from the same privileged background, the system can still be considered active against diverse representation.
Moreover, research has found that only 3% of referrals come from and are in favor of black employees. Look into your company’s data and it might present the same bleak picture. The chance of getting hired dramatically increases when the candidate is referred. Such is the case for white employees but not for their Black and Latino counterparts. The referrals are an excellent source of hiring talent. Ensure that you make the best use of it because they are an asset for diversity hiring and retention. Create a strong referral system for diverse employees with added advantages for those who refer strong candidates for the workforce. When you have a system in place, the data will show how easily will you be able to attract, hire, and retain women of color.
Establish Fair Performance Improvement Plan:
Most companies have unfair performance review problems with diverse employees. Only 29% of employees strongly agree that their performance reviews were just and fair. This gets worse when you start looking into the data specific to women of color. A study revealed that African Americans and women were less likely to get good ratings from reviewers from the opposite race. Another survey indicates that nearly 41% of African American women managers feel that they have to outperform their male counterparts to offset bias in the performance review process.
Performance reviews do not have to be a barrier in the diversity and inclusion process. In fact, if you look at the data and use this opportunity wisely, they can be one of the ways through which you can retain diverse talent in the long run. When used wisely and with the help of the data available, the performance review systems can help you optimize your diverse talent, enhance productivity in workflows, and discover & eliminate bias in managers’ performance reviews. They can also help you collect data and its effectiveness for DEI measures and initiatives in your organization that are otherwise very hard to track. Look into your current data set of hires, promotions, pay and compensation plans, and compare it with the data you get after a few months. In between, you ensure that there are DEI training and workshops against bias and discrimination for your managers. Furthermore, you should provide support to your diverse hires, especially those who have been recently onboarded. When you assess the data in a few months, it will help you look into performances and evaluate where your initiatives to retain diversity might be faltering and help catch bias in the managers as well.
Track Diversity Recruitment In Management:
Most of the companies make this mistake that they only track the data from new hires especially those who are in entry-level positions. Nearly 20% of organizations are not tracking any diversity metrics in their recruitment or hiring practices. But, this is the biggest mistake you can make. If you use data and AI systems to hire and track the performance of diverse employees, it can assist in reducing bias and discrimination. A study found that 47% of organizations have implemented technology to help reduce unconscious bias in their recruiting and hiring. Although 53% of employers have not implemented such technology, one-third of them have plans to do so in the future.
It has been noticed that more often than not recruiters prefer to hire those who have degrees from predominantly white institutions colleges instead of HBCUs, HSIs, Native Colleges, or community colleges even though their graduates might have valuable experience and skills. Such is the case for Black people or employees of color who often graduate from HBCUs, community colleges, and unprivileged backgrounds. Recruiters often fail in hiring them even though they have ample experience for the position. When you use data or AI to make decisions on who to hire, who to promote, and where are the lags, there are no chances for bias and discrimination to creep in. What’s more, is that tracking the data for your management and mid-management positions helps in evaluating the performances better and helps in promoting more employees to management positions. This could probably be neglected otherwise if the process is done manually and left on the HR teams to figure out.
Check out : 5 Ways to Retain Women of Color in STEM Professionals.
Related Article: Hiring Should be the First Step in Retaining Diverse Talent
