Hiring for Diversity

CHAPTER 10Empowering and Advancing Underrepresented Team Members

“Inclusion is the yin to the diversity yang.”

—Amy Stern, BI Worldwide

In 2015, Whirlpool took a look at its progress on diversity hiring and discovered an unexpected problem. Despite its success in hiring more diverse employees, the company had a “leaky bucket.” Underrepresented employees were leaving at a faster rate than they were being hired.

Whirlpool's leadership team knew that, left unchecked, this trend could have disastrous results for the company and its culture. To fix it, they developed a retention risk assessment toolkit that consisted of three phases:

1. Assess the impact to the organization should a particular employee leave.
2. Assess the likelihood that an employee might leave.
3. Create an action plan to ensure employees would stay and be successful.

Whirlpool decided to test the toolkit on a pilot group of 65 employees identified as top talent from underrepresented communities. To complete the assessment, each of the employee's managers was given a list of 25 questions to answer, such as, “If this employee left Whirlpool, would we lose significant intellectual capital?” and “Would this role be difficult to fill both internally and externally?”

What immediately became apparent was that the managers didn't know their employees well enough to answer the questions. So the company asked the employees to sit for a series of interviews with their managers. Those interviews yielded two major insights. First, ...