Hiring for Diversity

CHAPTER 2Building Your Diversity Hiring Vision, Goals, and Reporting

If you look at organizations that have made the greatest strides in their diversity hiring, you find that they all have certain things in common: they set clear goals, measured their results, and reported their progress.

This may sound obvious, but you'd be surprised how many smart, well-meaning organizations think they can skip these steps. And when they do, it rarely goes well.

In 2016, the New York Times Company published its first public diversity report. The report showed that in 2015, women made up 45 percent of the company and 40 percent of leadership. However, people of color represented just 27 percent of the company and 17 percent of leadership. For an organization that had long prided itself on holding those in power to high standards of diversity, equality, and justice, the report was an embarrassment. The Times’ own public editor, Liz Spayd, wrote a scathing column headlined, “Preaching the Gospel of Diversity, but Not Following It.”

“When you ask managers about the issue individually, everyone genuinely seems to care,” she wrote. “Collectively, however, not much changes.” Other publications were even less forgiving in their coverage.

The Times had made a bold move in sharing its representation data publicly, even knowing it would reflect badly on the company. Now, the Times needed a plan to do something about it. Stacey Olive, the Times’ then VP of Talent Acquisition, and her team knew this ...