16 Dec How to Measure Progress When it Comes to Recruiting for Diversity and Equity

Global mobility professionals, recruiters and employers can learn a lot about how to measure their own progress when it comes to hiring diverse professionals from Deloitte, which recently published a guide for fiscal year 2020.

Its workforce strategy on diversity and equity in the company generated positive results, which comprised the following:

• 42.7% of its hires were from diverse racial groups
• Black professionals comprised 8.8% of hiring, which is 31.3% greater than their representation in the firm
• It hired American Indian/Alaska Native (0.3%) and multiracial (4.8%) professionals at levels above representation (0.2% and 3.5% respectively)
• It hired Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander professionals at the same level as representation, contributing to unchanged representation for this cohort
• It hired Hispanic/Latinx (7.7%) professionals at levels above representation (6.4%)
• Hiring of female candidates increased by 7.6% since fiscal year 2018

How did Deloitte do it? Other companies can follow the blueprint below in terms of how it handles such a sensitive matter.

Strategic collaborations 

Deloitte invests annually in about 30 strategic sourcing relationships and alliances that assist in identifying top talent. These relationships and alliances span both student and experienced hire recruiting efforts. 

Artificial intelligence and robotics

It is piloting artificial intelligence and robotics solutions to help reduce possible bias in early recruitment stages (e.g., application screening process) and increase the diverse slate of candidates it considers for open positions.

Recruiting teams 

It is diversifying and training and sourcing and recruiting teams to reach more diverse candidates. It aims for increased overall diversity not only in the candidates it recruits, but also in the composition of its sourcing and recruiting teams.

Nontraditional recruiting

It is committed to augmenting the overall diversity of its professional talent pool by hiring and upskilling candidates from nontraditional recruitment channels. Deloitte continues to invest in hire-to-train and train-to-hire programs.

Unconscious bias training

It engages recruiters, global mobility professionals and hiring managers in training sessions aimed at helping them identify and mitigate unconscious biases that may arise in the recruiting process.

Immigration support

It continues to leverage opportunities to attract, retain, and develop its foreign national workforce.

Skilling professionals with strategies and tools

“We recognize that as humans, we have unconscious bias — so we need to be deliberate and intentional in minimizing opportunities for unconscious bias across the entire talent life cycle, including in our recruiting practices,” Kim Renaud (she/her/hers), National Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Recruiting leader, Deloitte Services LP.          

To do this, he added, “We are skilling our professionals with strategies and tools to mitigate any potential bias so we can enable objective, inclusive hiring decisions.” 

In building a diverse workforce, its recruiting efforts focused on two pipelines: entry/level undergraduate and graduate students and experienced hires. Its recruiting philosophy and associated activities anchor on its goal of identifying diverse talent and future leaders. 

Diversity and equity guide its workforce strategy, and they also fuel and influence how it operates as a business.

For diversity, it relied on the characteristics with which people are born, what people gain through experience, that make everyone different and similar. For equity, it was about the outcome of diversity, inclusion and anti-oppression wherein all people have fair access, opportunity, resources, and power to thrive with consideration for and elimination of historical and systematic barriers and privileges that cause oppression. 

While its strategy has evolved over the years, Deloitte has grounded its approach in data. Being a data-driven enterprise means conducting a comprehensive analysis of its current state, gathering both quantitative and qualitative data, identifying our biggest opportunity areas, and charting a measurable path forward. 

With this report,  it hopes to provide greater transparency and insight into these findings, which is valued both within and outside Deloitte.