Michael writes about improving diversity in recruitment and hiring
My co-blogger Michael Harris writes regularly for Electronic Recruiting Exchange’s eretoday
Today he is featured there writing about recruiting and hiring lessons from Abercrombie and Fitch’s recent discrimination settlement, discussed previously in this blawg here, here, and here.
While one can draw many lessons about desirable and undesirable employment practices from reading court decisions, sometimes even more can be learned from reviewing these consent decrees, which include forward-looking remedies to prevent future discrimination.
As Michael summarizes it, the Abercrombie and Fitch consent decree, which settled a set of three race discrimination charges challenging the company’s recruitment and hiring practices, suggests the following lessons:
1. Make sure all marketing materials, including those for your product or service, reflect diversity.
Supposedly, A & F suffered from a cultivated exclusionary white-bread image that, while it may have helped market to a targeted customer segment, discouraged minority applicants and became a vulnerability when it was used as evidence of discriminatory employment practices (which may or may not have actually occurred, of course).
2. Create a vice president of diversity position.
The A & F Fitch settlement creates such a position. Michael recounts the success from such a strategy at Denny’s, as described in an excellent article to which he links, previously cited in this blawg.
3. Incorporate diversity initiatives in recruitment programs.
Many useful and specific suggestions for broadening minority recruitment are mentioned.
4. Create job-related hiring processes.
A & F will use an industrial psychologist “to develop written job analyses in order to ensure a clear, systematic, and objective basis for making hiring decisions,” and will use structured interviews, incorporating behavioral questions
Specific irrelevant factors that may not be considered are also specified, “such as enrollment in a target college, participation in particular athletic activities, and involvement in particular fraternities or sororities.” (If applied to the top job in the land, both parties would have been accused of violating this principle by clearly discriminating in favor of preppies who attended Yale and were in Skull & Crossbones!)
5. Evaluate managers on diversity.
“If you want managers to help attract and retain a diverse workforce, it is imperative that they be evaluated on how well they attain diversity objectives and rewarded for achieving the established goals.”
6. Use metrics to measure diversity.
“The Abercrombie and Fitch settlement lists in detail the various metrics that will be used in determining whether the company is meeting its diversity goals.”
Michael concludes:
Although there is no foolproof system to avoiding lawsuits, these tactics, if properly designed and implemented, should be helpful both in protecting your organization from legal issues and in encouraging an effective diversity recruitment and hiring program — which is a great benefit in its own right.Sphere: Related Content
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Since 1978 I have conducted mostly searches which seek Spanish language skills to varying degrees. Because Hispanics have learned that skill more often than white or oriental Americans, my candidate pool invariably has more Hispanics than other groups.
In discussing this impact on the appicant pool on other forums where many recruiters chat, it is clear that even the positive impact of diversity is in question by many. And this mindset by those employees or consultants on which companies rely on to develop the candidate pool!
What are the legal ramifications of developing a candidate pool when:
1. You seek Spanish language skills (to any degree- a plus, preferred, highly preferred, required) among the other skills
2. You use internal or external specialists to identify those skills?