The Pomegranate Principle

CHAPTER SIXSTOP DOING THIS: Allowing the Fake Failed Search to Thwart Your DEI Recruiting Strategy

The intention to be more diverse is step one in being able to adapt and thrive in a changing, competitive landscape. But no matter how deeply, how broadly, or how often you state that intention, without concrete steps to become more diverse, it is likely that you'll have a lot of turnover, and you will never get to a critical momentum. Recruiting diverse talent at scale is step two and I have seen several patterns emerge in how companies that intend to be more diverse actually have processes and biases in place that thwart those efforts. One such tension is the scenario where diversity executives and the HR executives are the evangelists for DEI in the workplace and they are trying to move a recalcitrant organization into a progressive direction. And they are meeting resistance primarily from white line managers and executives who respond, “I get it with DEI, but I just want to hire the best person available.” That's a highly biased comment because, if you were hiring the best person available, the organization would not be demographically skewed toward white people. It would not, unless you can prove that there's disproportionate qualification and genius in the white community versus other demographic groups. That is simply incorrect. Intelligence is equally distributed throughout the world, but for many organizations the first hurdle to overcome, through the seemingly benign ...