When people ask me what I do for a living, my mood and my audience generally governs my response.  For example, if I am in a playful mood and the person I am speaking with seems like they can have a little fun, I’ll tell them I’m a “headhunter”.  I actually had a guy thinking one day that I really hunted “heads”.  I’m not sure if it was the odd look I got back from him or his sudden interest in being somewhere else that gave me the first clue but once I set him straight he said he understood and hastily “beat feet” out of there.  I mean, no sense hanging out with someone who is sizing your mug up for a shelf somewhere if you don’t have to.

Most often though, I respond with one of a list of usually acceptable descriptors - I am an “Executive Recruiter”, a “Search Consultant”, a plain, simple and to the point “Recruiter” or very rarely, my wife’s personal favorite: a “Corporate Matchmaker”.  I dare say she saw Fiddler on The Roof one to many times as a young girl.

What inevitably follows though is very curious.  The most logical next question is: What is your area of specialty? This one really gets them.  Whether I tell them I specialize in recruiting minorities and women or that I am a diversity recruiter really makes no difference.  The blank look is the same.  Let me explain.

You see, I am a 49 year old, short, bald white guy.  Now that shouldn’t make a difference but it always does.  It doesn’t matter if I am talking to a person of color, a women or another middle aged bald, white guy; the blank look remains, followed by a rather common “that’s interesting”.  I never liked the word “interesting” much, yet it always seems to appear at this very point in a conversation.  Interesting…

So I go off explaining myself depending on the “interest” of the person across from me.  Young people seem to get it quicker.  It is not that their neurons are firing faster than the more mature among us though I’m sure that has something to do with it. It has more to do with their reality. The world around them is changing very fast as are the people they interact with daily; a largely diverse audience to be sure.  People in the under 30 crowd look around them and see a ratio of Caucasians to people of color in the 2:1 range while the older gentlemen I might play golf with at the club on Saturday has a very different perspective.  His peer group averages out at about 7:1.  To the former, diversity recruiting is almost always about the changing marketplace and to the latter; Affirmative Action.

How I got to this place in my career is, dare I say: “interesting”.  I have been a recruiter on the corporate or search side for more than 20 years.  It wasn’t until my last corporate job though that I saw diversity recruiting in a different light.  Up until this point, hiring minorities and to a lesser extent, women came because the government told us we had to do it.  I mean, it was voluntary of course but if you didn’t do it and have a specific agenda around how and why you did it, you were, simply put, in “deep weeds” with the EEOC or OFCCP.  It didn’t seem right to me but then of course at the time I was a young, budding middle aged white guy.

In 1994 though, I joined an Insurance company in the Twin Cities and for the first time was presented with a factual argument for recruiting and hiring diverse talent.  It was all about changing demographics and the emerging marketplace.  I met an African American woman in 1998 that proclaimed assuredly that she was a member of the “emerging majority”.

After going off on my own as a “headhunter”, I was approached by an associate who being Hispanic himself, was trying to convince me to create a job board on the Internet for Latinos.  I, of course, responded with” we all know there are no Latinos online”.  I couldn’t have been more wrong.  My transformation into an enlightened white guy had begun and before long we had job boards like AsianCareers.com and Africareers.com to serve every vertical.  This white guy was finally “getting it”.

That didn’t mean however that all of the people around me were “jumping on board”.  Minorities and whites alike looked at me like I was a Martian.   After a couple of cocktails one night, a distinguished African American gentlemen asked me just what I was trying to prove? I didn’t understand.  You see for me, this was a very simple business decision.  The market had changed and to survive you either changed with it or withered away.  I was, more than anything else, addressing a need the market had presented to me.

Some people would remark off-hand that no matter how hard I tried I was not going to be Black or Hispanic or whatever.  Some white folks took it a tad more personal.  Let’s just say they weren’t pleased with my business focus.  Here we are though, 10 years later and once again I believe the market has changed.  It could be construed by some as just semantics while others might say “I told you so”.  Nonetheless, the winds of change are blowing.

Truth be told, I have never been a big fan of affirmative action programs.  They served their place at a point in time but I was always struck by the blatant inconsistencies in the legislation or perhaps more appropriately in the practice.  There were no such things as quotas for example yet we did have goals and they darn sure better be met lest the wrath of a government acronym agency come swooping down upon you in the middle of the night to camp out for a year or two.

To many , “Diversity Recruiting” wasn’t that at all.  For a good number of our Corporate citizens it became “minority hiring”.  It had become active discrimination affording one ethnic group an advantage over another regardless of qualifications and at a minimum, despite them.

It just didn’t seem appropriate to me.  I mean, do you make a “wrong” a “right” by reversing the discriminatory practice?  I think not.  In a rare private audience with a prominent minority political leader I was once again “enlightened”.  The speaker was the Reverend Jesse Jackson who promptly informed our group that we should not get too attached to the term “Diversity”.  He further explained that while the goal of diversity was admirable, what women and minorities were really looking for was an invitation to the party - a gala, which up until recently, they were watching from outside the hall. He told us to endeavor to be more “inclusive”.  Not to celebrate our differences but more so, our similarities and with that he left the room.

Well, I will be the first to admit I am not a fan of the big man’s politics.  In fact that would be something of an understatement.  Here though, his words made real sense.  All that minority and female candidates were ultimately interested in were to be considered for an opportunity. Considered, so that their skills, and experiences could shine through the haze that up to this point had enveloped them.  In order to obtain that consideration, they had to be invited to the party, that is – to be “included” in the pool of candidates.  This invitation need not be engraved, gilded in gold or even be written for that matter.  It very simply needed to be extended, on an equal footing with all other qualified and interested candidates.

One would assume of course that given all the legislation and Federal, State and local edicts that this was automatic; but of course it is not.  Even to this day.  How could that be you ask?

Common approaches to diversity recruiting offer all the data needed to identify the challenge AND the solution. Let me explain.

Companies and organizations will often initially address the challenges of diversity recruiting by first including the all too familiar EOEM/F or some variation thereof at the bottom of their advertising.  Of course the government said you had to do it but it was a step nonetheless.  The more adventurous might then begin posting jobs on diversity focused job boards or running ads in minority publications - Again, good stuff.  As time goes on these same companies will “embrace diversity” in their mission statements and send employees and leadership to diversity training. 

At this point, the company or organization is likely to begin receiving diverse candidates who through any of the above vehicles became familiar with their mission of inclusion and want to be considered for employment.  These resumes are often received into a master database of all candidates. It is at this critical juncture the plan for inclusionary hiring practices goes awry.

While President of a diversity job board, a large retail client of ours received on average more than 1 million resumes per year from all sources.  From us they had gotten no less than 29,000 professional level diverse candidates during that time period and each of those resumes went into the master database.  At the end of the year they contacted us disappointed that they had not had one single hire from our efforts in the previous twelve months.  We were startled and began sorting through the resumes we had sent.  Among them were hundreds of some incredibly strong candidates ideally suited for employment at their company.  Upon further investigation we discovered the “culprit” if you will.  It was their process that directly contributed to their inability to consider and hire diverse talent and in particular our 29,000 candidate contributions.

 As a percentage of the total candidate database, our resumes represented only about 3% meaning that these diverse candidates stood a less than 1 in 33 chance of ever even being considered.  Add to that the fact that in certain career fields like engineering and audit, African American and Hispanic candidates represent less than 5% of the total candidates in the career field.  These diverse professionals had a statistical disadvantage right for the start but I’m not finished.  The company’s database was set to sort candidates not by skill or experience but in alphabetical order leaving  a vast number of candidates whose names begin with the letter G, H or below out of consideration.  These issues conspired to create an unfair and potentially disastrous legal liability for them.  How on earth could they answer the inevitable question that would be asked in a audit for example.  Questions like: EEOC -“Now let me see if I understand this correctly, you retained a diversity focused resource that provided you with more than 29,000 potential diverse employees and you considered none of them?  Is that correct?”  You get the idea.

Let’s go back a few paragraphs and look at what diverse candidates are really looking for.  They want to be considered on an equal footing with other qualified candidates and at a minimum get consideration or an invitation to the “party”.  Now some would say, well Carl that is exactly what we did.  We put the diverse candidate into the database with every other candidate and each had an opportunity to compete for the role on an equal footing.  If that were really the case; however, why did the company look back on their major diversity recruiting effort for that entire year only to discover they hired no one from the group?  Were their managers engaged in active discrimination or was their process guilty of discriminatory hiring practices?  Neither actually. They were however responsible for creating an atmosphere of “diversity” without “inclusion”.  In essence, to use a tired worn out phrase, they were not “walking the talk”.

What could they have done differently?  Well, for openers they could ensure their Applicant Tracking System is sorting by skill and experience and not by alphabetical order.  Seems elementary but then again the tough issues often are.  This would give Maria Ramirez and Anthony Washington a fighting chance for sure.  They could establish “talent pools” of highly skilled and qualified diverse and female candidates in each career field from which they could select “qualified candidates” for consideration amongst all other general market candidates.  The key word here is “consideration”.  No one, especially me is suggesting you MUST hire diverse and female candidates regardless of their relative skills and experience.  You SHOULD however at a very minimum invite them to the hiring gala and give them a “look see”.  This after all is the essence of inclusionary hiring practices.  You will not always hire the diverse professional nor should you.  You should hire the most qualified candidate for the job regardless of their race, ethnicity, gender, religion, physical ability or sexual preference.  You MUST give everyone, and I mean every qualified candidate, an EQUAL opportunity to compete. By allowing statistically disadvantaged but otherwise qualified candidates to be excluded from the process simply because it is easier will not help the candidate to be sure nor will it assist your company or organization in transcending diversity into inclusion.

About the author:

Carl Braun is the Senior Vice-President of Strategic Recruiting for The Inclusiv* Group (formerly Diversity Recruiters International Inc). He is the former President of DiversityInc Careers , Vice-President of DiversityInc Magazine and author of the books “Success is Your Birthright!” and “Success is Your Birthright Too! He was the host of the ABC radio talk show “The Soapbox”  and “The Employment News Hour” Carl has been recruiting for more than 20 years.

The Inclusiv* Group , at www.Inclusiv.net, is a minority owned executive search firm dedicated to inclusion and equality in the workplace. We are experts in helping companies build cultural competency at senior levels of an organization and pride ourselves on developing candidate slates that are balanced. Carl Braun can be reached at 619-575-6577 or cfbraun@inclusiv.net .

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