To be a minority is to always be aware of the diversity of your surroundings.
Being a Black woman comes to me as naturally as eating and breathing. It’s all I’ve ever known, and my love for my identity knows no bounds — but that doesn’t mean I can’t tell when I’m not shown the same love back from the world in which my Black womanhood exists.
Covert acts of racial bias, uncomfortably tense settings and awkward responses to mask displeasure aren’t new to me. Never was I more aware of diversity than when I was on the job hunt after college. Leaving a historically Black university (HBCU) and entering the workplace, meant carrying a newfound respect for my heritage and hoping to find a company that would appreciate it.
Diversity and representation in the workplace aren’t meant to be glossed over. To make sure this conversation was given its proper due, I spoke with Sharai Johnson, an independent recruiter and diversity acquisition consultant, about how companies should approach diversity recruitment, where responsibilities should be delegated and what it takes to promote real change.
Diversity starts from the top down
It isn’t difficult to understand why some companies might believe that creating a diverse workforce starts with diverse hiring. Employees are often chosen from a pool of applicants, right? While this is true, Johnson says expecting real inclusion to come solely from the talent acquisition process isn't the right way to go about it. Instead, she says companies should be doing the work to create an inclusive work environment long before they get into the recruiting process.
“It’s about hiring leaders, people in decision-making positions first that are Black and Brown, then hiring a diversity team that can analyze your entire company and then making the changes in your culture,” Johnson said. “It’s not about going out and finding Black and Brown bodies and taking them back to an all-White space where they don’t feel welcomed or like they belong. Once you have leaders who are educated on how unconscious bias looks in their work and feel like your work culture is inclusive, then you can talk about talent acquisition initiatives.”
Tackling racial bias and supporting equitable systems is no small task. It requires fighting against centuries of heinous practices, standing up against systemic racism and confronting your own actions when they present themselves as harmful to others. The “easiest” way of starting this journey is by creating a foundation that prioritizes diversity and inclusion from the beginning.
“It starts with having leadership buy-in [on the journey of equitable recruitment], creating real commitment and continuing to enforce that. If you’re a leader in your company and you’re having meetings within your company, you should be having conversations about diversity so people can start to see that this is a priority,” said Johnson. “Always ask yourself, ‘How can I diversify the leaders at the top?’ It’s one thing to hire Black and Brown people for entry-level and mid-level positions, but until we actually have the ability to make decisions there’s no use.”
Johnson says you want to create processes and systems that make the entire recruitment process equitable. This means leveraging your stance as a company to educate the public about recruiting processes, what you’re looking for on job applications and how candidates should interact with recruiters. It’s also helpful to hire a consultant who knows how to train your employees on diversity practices.
“I say consultant because there are a lot of trainings you can take and require people to do, but that doesn’t do anything if they don’t know how to utilize them in the context of their work,” said Johnson. “Engineers should not be looking at DEI the same way I as a recruiter would. They’re building out a platform so they should be looking at how that platform can be built out in equitable ways while I’m making sure the way I’m interacting with candidates is equitable and not filled with bias. Companies have to understand that they can’t just buy a training program; you have to bring in a consultant that can break down how each leader can interact with that knowledge.”
Establishing those processes can help your brand to develop inclusive work environments that go beyond temporary diversity training influenced by the current trend of multicultural marketing. We’ve seen a lot of initiatives around HBCUs, workplace policies and monetary donations, but Johnson says real change comes from consistent dedication to the cause.
“This diversity conversation started in 2020 with the death of George Floyd, and we’re now here in 2022 and DEI is being scaled back, people are losing their momentum for the initiatives they input in place, they’re not listening to the people they hired,” said Johnson. “Lots of diversity recruiters are leaving companies, because the initiatives promised by their employers were fake — they would bring people out, interview them, and it wouldn’t go anywhere from there.”
Consciously making an effort to combat unconscious bias can be something of an uphill battle. In fact, our brains are biased by nature. We learn how to categorize things from an early age using things like our sight or sense of taste to tell us what belongs where. Those same neurological pointers can lead to unconscious bias in work settings. But there’s also beauty in appreciating each other’s differences.
“When you walk into a room with a bunch of people from different backgrounds and they look different than you, those conversations tend to be better and a lot more fun,” said Johnson. “When you walk into a room and everyone looks the same, those are pretty boring conversations.”
The one conversation worth having, however, is the one that will lead your company to better diversity and inclusion practices; and while this is a post around the importance of diversity in the talent acquisition process, I urge you to prioritize diversity in all areas of your brand. Being a catalyst for change doesn’t happen in one sector or during one trend-driven period of time — it happens when you make an effort for the long-term.
