Incorporating Diversity and Inclusion in Recruitment

The Recruitment Hackers Podcast

Max:

Hello, and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host Max Ambruster and today I'm delighted to welcome on the show, Cynthia Owyoung, who is the author of a new book “All are welcome - how to build a real workplace culture of inclusion that delivers results.” And we're going to be speaking about, well, the results, mainly, and how talent acquisition can drive that. And how the field has changed over the last 20 years. Because Cindy has been in the space for a long time and has seen the world change. So, Cindy, welcome to the show.

Cynthia:

Thank you so much, Max, for having me. I'm excited to have the conversation with you.

Max:

Yeah, thanks for coming. And congrats on the new book. Before we get into the book and the lessons, could you share with me and with my audience, our audience, your curriculum and how you ended up in the beautiful world of inclusion?

Cynthia:

It's a great question, I did not have a very straight path to it, it was a little bit roundabout and curvy. I started my career actually in marketing, I worked for ad agencies doing consumer research and strategic branding. But after a decade of that, I decided it wasn't that fulfilling. And I wanted to do something that would feed my soul a little bit more than just selling products to people, that sometimes they didn't actually need. So, I went to grad school intending to start my own nonprofit, because I have a brother who is developmentally disabled. And, you know, being Asian, and having a disability in the Asian community, culturally, that can be very taboo. And so, you know, my brother being an adult, he had aged out of a lot of services that are given to children under the age of 18. And I…still on my life plan, I'm still going to do a nonprofit that supports adults in the Asian community with developmental disability.

But I decided to put it off because I met some folks who did diversity and inclusion work inside companies. And once I heard what they did, which was you know, I mean, they work to create access and inclusion for everyone and equal opportunities. I thought to myself, well, that's what I want to do, right? That's something where I can make a positive difference in the world, employ people like my brother, and really open doors, instead of being the one that knocks on them all the time. So, I made the switch. I got my first job in diversity management at a company called Intuit, which does financial tax software, and have been lucky enough since then, for almost 20 years now to work in several types of tech-companies, media, global, startup, gone into financial services. And now, written the book.

Max:

Yeah. And because we haven't dropped all the names after into it, but I will mention them, Cindy worked at Yahoo, GitHub, Charles Schwab. And most recently Ability Path and in Robin Hood, so quite a resume. And many beautiful companies, I think that have had, you know, leaders in their field. Of course, not everybody can afford to have a Head of Diversity and inclusion, can have an officer like small company like myself, 50 employees, I think, I have to be the Head of Diversity myself. So, yeah, is there a way for companies that are on the smaller range, side of the range to, to think about, okay, what do I do about diversity and inclusion? And who should be in charge? Should somebody be in charge? And I what point do I hire? Can I afford to hire someone?

Cynthia:

Really good question. So yes, absolutely. And you know, it's funny that you mentioned that you should be the Head of Diversity and Inclusion at your company, because yes, you should. And you actually find a lot more leaders these days are taking up that mantle from…in a very official status, right? The CEO of Nielsen, which is a marketing measurement company, here in the US, that I think operates globally as well. Their CEO announced a few years ago that he was the chief diversity officer for the company. And that's definitely a growing trend, others CEOs have made very similar kinds of statements. And it's important because it's important to have the senior most leaders of any company, whether you're small, 15 people or 100,000 people, really committed to supporting diversity and inclusion, because your employees take their signal from that, right? If they hear that you care about the space, then they're going to be more accountable to supporting the space.

And you know, any company like you don't actually have to have a dedicated person, you don't have to necessarily have a huge budget for this, like, there's lots of low cost ways to incorporate this into your company, whether that is taking advantage of free training and online seminars that are out there, or even just like buying things like my book, right, and having a book club to have a conversation about different concepts around diversity, equity and inclusion, you know, thinking about who you're hiring, and where you're hiring from. Any hiring manager has decision making power over that, right? And I can really think about how to incorporate that diverse lens into how they're sourcing for candidates and how they're considering competencies in the space and who they want, to what perspective they want to add to their team. So, all of these ways are ways in which the, you know, no cost, no real like, you know, effort to do other than being intentional about it.

Max:

Great, well, let's get into recruitment since that's our focus on the show. And so the intention of you set on sourcing, as well as on the selection front, you know, being more opening the door to other groups. The sourcing question is difficult, it's a little technical, because on one hand, you could say, well, I'm going to open the door by basically communicating jobs to as many people as possible using popular channels like social media to just get the word out, and so that we're not really restricted to word of mouth referral networks. Another approach would be intentionally to say, okay, I'm going to go look for people who are hearing impaired and neurodivergent and, you know, work at home moms, and all kinds of categories, and that, then that becomes like, a very difficult endeavor, because you don't necessarily find these pockets. I don't know, I perhaps…Pardon my ignorance, but I don't know if there was even such marketplaces available to recruiters where they can go and pick by category by category if they wanted to do so.

Cynthia:

Not quite like that. But there are definitely ways to, I think you can actually do both, right. I think it's important to like get the word out to as wide an audience as possible, right, so that you can find the best talent from the available pool, right? I mean, that's everyone's goal, right? They want to hire the best person, the most qualified person for their jobs. The question is always like, have you actually put out a wide enough net to capture the interest of the most qualified best person for your job? And do you define, you know, an effective sourcing process, as you know, looking for diversity within that? I do, I think most companies should, right. And what you can do in terms of like, sourcing, specifically for people of very, you know, specific and different backgrounds, is you can look for organizations that produce pipeline around that.

There's lots of technology platforms these days that actually provide matching algorithms for people from diverse backgrounds to different jobs. Some of them are targeted by gender, some of them are targeted by race, others are targeted by disability, and others for you...