Committed to Building Diverse Communities, Cultures, and Companies.
For the last several months we have shared some thoughts about hiring and diversity. Our goal is to build a community of human resource professionals that share our passion for how understanding human capital trends and data can lead to innovation and improvement across every area of an organization.
While COVID and remote work have challenged us as HR professionals to think and work differently, the biases and social injustices impacting our businesses and communities are requiring us to take immediate action. You have likely renewed your focus on diversity and inclusion or maybe you have even invested in hiring diversity and inclusion leaders. Perhaps you have launched new organization-wide diversity programs or affinity groups, and maybe diversity and inclusion has become a regular topic at your executive and board meetings.
All this focus is exactly what is needed to build communities and cultures that thrive on diversity and inclusion, but what data are we using to make these choices?
At Outmatch, we have made a commitment to ensure our hiring practices are stronger by committing to building diverse pools of candidates as well as working to remove unconscious bias through the increased use of our own solutions. The result we seek is to make Outmatch an even more diverse organization resulting in a better impact to our communities, our business and to you our customers.
In addition to looking at our own data, we decided to look beyond our data to that of our customers – across different industries, different size companies, different hiring challenges, etc. Here is a small, but interesting, sample of some diversity insights we found:
- In an applicant pool where 20% of applicants were people of color and taking an assessment, only 15% were being hired
- In an applicant pool were 49% of applicants were white and taking an assessment, 60% were being hired
Was this because white applicants were stronger matches based on their assessment? We found something a bit different.
- Black candidates scored higher on the assessment overall, and
- In looking at the details blacks scored higher in key areas like driving results
So, why do we think this data is important or interesting? By looking at outcomes of hiring processes and diving deeper into where data changes in the process, we can see where processes are strong and where we might want to have deeper understanding so our outcomes reflect our intent. While looking at what happened is interesting, imagine if we looked at our data real time (what is happening during the process). Would we drive different or better outcomes?
We recognize the data above is only a part of your hiring process and that there are other important parts such as evaluating hard skills and overall professionalism during an interview, but as you think about your hiring process, you should ask yourself, “how am I using data to eliminate unconscious bias?”
We would love to hear from you on this topic. What data would be interesting as it relates to hiring and/or diversity and inclusion? Let us know your thoughts and we will share insights with you. By all of us sharing our thoughts and learnings, we can all make our businesses and communities