Patty McCord, Netflix’s former head of talent, was recently in Australia talking about overturning traditional approaches to recruitment and diversity was a key underpinning of her message.

Instead of thinking about the person we want to hire, McCord says a better approach is to think about the problem you want to solve. This approach helps us move beyond hiring the same people over and over again who are like us (called affinity bias) and become more receptive to different opinions and perspectives. It helps meet the diversity of customer needs too.

There’s another reason why we think rethinking recruitment to focus on the problem needing to be solved, as McCord recommends, is important. The benefit of this approach is that it helps us avoid associations with the current incumbent.

Given that the gender of the person currently doing the role will influence who is seen as most suitable for it, as business psychologists such as Professor Binna Kandola have shown, it’s all too easy to overlook candidates from different backgrounds.

McCord is also well known for highlighting the risks of hiring for ‘cultural fit’, as she stated in Harvard Business Review earlier this year. 

‘What most people really mean when they say someone is a good fit culturally is that he or she is someone they’d like to have a beer with. But people with all sorts of personalities can be great at the job you need done. This misguided hiring strategy can also contribute to a company’s lack of diversity, since very often the people we enjoy hanging out with have backgrounds much like our own.’

Like McCord, we think it’s important to challenge affinity bias, as well as other biases that can impact hiring such as halo effect, confirmation bias and priming. Going a step further, we recommend hiring managers understand implicit gender and cultural stereotyping that inhibits diversity in organisations.

That’s why we’ve created workshops for hiring managers (and recruitment specialists) and a leader conversation guide called ‘Recruiting Fairly and Objectively: Challenging Unconscious Bias in Recruitment’. 

In our two-hour workshops, leaders learn several ways to promote diversity and reduce bias in each stage of the recruitment process, from the decision to search internally or externally, job advertising, shortlisting, interviewing to on-boarding. 

We explain the value of de-identifying CVs, avoiding gendered language, advertising in diverse channels, clear selection criteria and consistency of process.

As many of us know, too much hiring manager discretion increases the potential for subjectivity, inconsistency and bias.

We think it’s also important to include an ‘inclusion competency’ in job and selection criteria. This aligns with broader company efforts to promote inclusion in leadership behaviours, practices and policies.

To assess a candidate’s inclusion competency, you might ask for example:

• Have you worked with others from diverse backgrounds and with different experiences? What were the challenges and benefits of that diversity?
• How have you handled a situation when a colleague or a direct report was not accepting of others’ background, values, or experiences?
• Can you share examples of how you’ve encouraged different perspectives in your team meetings in the past?

All of these techniques offer a way to rethink recruitment more rigorously and objectively, and advance diversity and inclusion progress in organisations more generally. And that brings a range of benefits such as increased innovation, better problem solving, and access to broader talent pools.

If you’d like more information about our recruitment workshops, conversation guide, or would like to chat about your company’s particular needs, please call us on 1800 571 999 or email info@diversitypartners.com.au. We’d love to hear from you.