5 Ways To Make Your Hiring Process More Accessible
When thinking and talking about diversity and inclusion, so much of the focus gets put on the hiring and retaining of diverse talent. While achieving equity and inclusion and building a diverse team are only possible when these commitments are embedded into the fabric of every aspect of an organization, there are some key considerations worth making when thinking about our hiring processes.
Specifically, we seem committed to building systems of hiring that will provide the same process for every applicant and will be accommodating, fair, and support a commitment to diversity and inclusion.
With applicants being so varied in their experiences, identities, and needs, how is a fixed system supposed to properly accommodate for each person?
A comfortable and deeply enriching application process for one person might be exclusive and inaccessible to the next.
In many larger-scale hiring machines, we see inaccessibility, inequities, and discrimination in places we never meant to produce them. From experience requirements, to the information we make available when we post a job opening online (it’s time we all agreed to include salary ranges in job postings - please!), to what process applicants are made to engage with, awesome applicants are falling through the cracks and missing out on opportunities with awesome companies every single day.
So, let’s talk about some ways that discrimination and oppression manifest themselves in the hiring process, but let’s also talk about some tweaks and adjustments that can be made in order to build dynamic, intuitive, and flexible hiring systems, no matter the organization or industry we’re part of.
1. Be flexible with traditional educational credentials
There are jarring disparities when it comes to access to a university or college education, with underrepresented groups on campuses existing primarily at the intersections between race, class, and socioeconomic status.
According to the Centre for American Progress, in the United States, “Students of color, especially Black [sic] and Latinx students, are more underrepresented at selective universities today than they were 35 years ago. In fact, a Black student enrollment disparity exists at 45 of the 50 flagship state universities, meaning that the percentage of undergraduates who are Black is lower than the percentage of high school graduates in that state who are Black."
While campuses across North America are called to develop and implement more progressive admissions policies and procedures to address these glaring discrepancies, companies in both the public and private sectors are called to acknowledge this lack of access when developing their own hiring systems.
These issues are not specific to the Black population in the United States, either. We need not look further than just north of the border.
Universities Canada, a central lobbying voice for universities across the country, has named increasing access to higher education for Indigenous students as a main priority, citing the stark difference between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians who have a university degree.
A lack of diversity among a company’s staff and senior leadership is not a simple as “pipeline issues” over which a company has little or no control.
While systemic racism and the negative consequences of settler-colonialism need to be addressed and disrupted in order to populate “pipelines” with a greater diversity of potential applicants, companies need to look in the mirror at their own standards pertaining to traditional credential requirements.
This is not to say that we should do away with the notion that university or college degrees or credentials hold any merit, but rather that a credential does not tell the whole story of how suited someone is for a particular role or how much success they will find as part of your team.
Moving to a system that does more to assess skill-sets (see the work being done to this end by the folks at Plum), intangibles (like emotional intelligence, attitude, values, and demeanor), and is less rigid about degree requirements (i.e. moving from “required” to “preferred” or “seen as an asset” will keep the door open, so long as it is backed up with an eager commitment to assess applicants fairly who lack these qualifications) will be more conducive to supporting diversity at any organization.
2. Loosen experience requirements
It would be downright silly to talk extensively about formal credentials and not also talk about restrictive job experience requirements that come with so many jobs, even at the entry-level.
According to Talent Works, after sampling 100,000 entry-level job postings, they found that a staggering 61% required 3+ years of professional experience.
Entry and mid-level jobs that require extensive previous work experience privileges the privileged, who’ve been given opportunities in the past, and closes the door to many job-seekers with diverse intersectional identities who have not had access to those same opportunities by virtue of systemic discrimination and oppression.
We’re already seeing some industry leaders identify this as a problem and take steps to restructure their hiring mechanisms.
Looking to the tech sector, one of the fastest-growing parts of our economy, we see giants like Microsoft, Apple, and Google eliminate entry-level job requirements in favour of a more holistic assessment of an individual’s suitability for these roles.
Microsoft’s Corporate Vice-President, Ann Johnson, "has spoken at length about the need for a more diverse workforce,” explaining to Business Insider that rather than focusing on credentials and formal work experience, "she encourages a focus on soft skills like teamwork and curiosity, as well as a candidate's willingness to self-train and learn quickly."
Research has shown a connection between a team’s diversity and their ability to anticipate, cope, adapt, and display overall resilience in the workplace. Diverse teams are made up of folks with varying experiences and identities, many of whom are systematically restricted in their ability to acquire the job experience on their resumes required to be seriously considered for the jobs our organizations are posting every single day.
We are called to come together and think critically about what we want to accomplish as organizations, how a particular role fits into that vision, and ultimately, what skills, attitudes, and foundational competencies are ideal in a successful candidate for that role.
3. Design a system that allows applicants to choose their interview panel
While this suggestion might seem far-fetched or silly to you, bear with us.
The impact that psychological safety has on one’s ability to be productive at work cannot be overstated.
Google’s Project Aristotle found that psychological safety was the single most impactful factor tied to good performance across its organization. While "psychological safety” in the mainstream is most commonly thought of as feeling free to express divergent opinions without it feeling like a great interpersonal risk, we need to infuse this conversation with consideration of how power imbalances may also greatly impact one’s willingness to speak up, as well as their ability to feel safe and free to concentrate on work tasks.
So, let’s talk about how power can inform our understanding of safety at work.
A study by Fierce Inc. in 2017 found that while roughly 1 in 5 workers reported having felt unsafe at work, that the number increased to cover over a quarter of women. At work and in our daily lives, women are more often victims of sexual violence and harassment, as well as systems of discrimination like sexism.
Though everyone is capable of committing acts of discrimination and violence, men are more commonly perpetrators of intimate partner violence, sexual violence, and sexual harassment, while women and non-binary people are more likely to be victims or survivors.
As we piece together this puzzle, it is also important to acknowledge how close the relationship is between experiencing something like sexual violence and psychological safety.
Research has clearly shown that victims and survivors of sexual violence are far more likely to experience Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, greatly impeding one’s ability to feel psychologically safe and focused at work, create and maintain relationships, or establish trust with people or organizations.
So, what does this tapestry of determinants help us understand?
Very simply, that it is reasonable to expect that an applicant might feel psychologically unsafe in an interview setting, depending on their past experiences and what the interview looks like. While it has become common across industries to value and address psychological safety among staff members in the workplace, we should also be thinking about psychological safety during the hiring process, too.
In the event that a victim/survivor of sexual violence perpetrated by a man is in an interview where men make up their entire interview panel, their feelings of safety and comfort are very likely to be hampered.
Seeing as this scenario does not capture every experience of trauma that applicants might have, as they exist across genders, races, and identities, employing a system where applicants can choose from a list of team members to be interviewed by will allow all to feel more empowered and safe throughout the process.
And, perhaps more importantly, those successful will likely hit the ground running, as they’ll be beginning their career at your organization with less apprehension. Compassionate hiring systems build trust and connection with applicants.
Accommodating someone throughout this process might also mean bypassing a formal interview altogether if it is not accessible for an applicant for any number of reasons, and can instead take the form of a phone call, technical assignment, or even sending written questions to an applicant who can record their answers and send it back.
It’s important to provide these options upfront rather than relying on someone to make these types of requests, as often this can feel overwhelming.
However flexible you are able to be, we encourage you to lean in. Ensuring someone is able to focus on their interview, whatever that may look like, means you are able to get the most accurate glimpse of their potential and what they will bring to the table.
And hey, isn’t that the whole point?
4. Proactively offer choices for applications and tests
Many companies, especially those whose work is more technical in nature, will make skills tests a required step in the interview process.
Others mandate answering written application questions that ask anything from “Tell us why you’d like to work here” to “Help us understand what skills you possess and how they will make us better.”
Others, still, will bypass both a written application and skills test altogether when crafting their hiring process.
Every organization is different, and as such, the goal here is not to establish a one-size-fits-all process that will allow both an applicant to thrive and an organization to learn everything they’d like to about a candidate’s suitability.
Rather, the goal is to design for flexibility that allows job seekers to maintain agency and be properly accommodated, but that will allow an organization to assess suitability no matter what the process looks like.
As long as someone is able to demonstrate bona fide occupational work requirements (BFOR - read more about those here), we can be more flexible and creative about how we are accommodating applicants.
Let’s look at dyslexia, for example. Many folks with dyslexia can struggle to communicate as efficiently via the written word as they are able to otherwise, as most dyslexic disorders involve some difficultly in learning to read and/or interpret words/symbols.
In a survey conducted in 2018 by The Dyslexic Evolution, whose work is focused on mentoring and supporting dyslexic professionals, 7 in 10 dyslexic workers said they found the recruiting/hiring process difficult to get through.
When asked to elaborate, respondents noted that written tests, psychometric tests, focusing on academic skills, and written application requirements were their biggest barriers to access.
Thinking of a differently affected population in blind and visually impaired applicants, we similarly find barriers that many companies are not being mindful of or proactively creating workarounds for.
Speaking to Monster.com, a spokesperson for the National Federation of the Blind said:
“If I’m a blind person and I go to an employer’s website and I can’t even fill out the basic job application, that discourages me and tells me that employer is maybe not all that serious about hiring blind people or hasn’t really thought about it.”
We live in a world where different people, for varied reasons, have different needs and thresholds that need to be addressed in order for everyone to be able to access our organizations by way of our hiring processes.
Create options.
Do you typically ask for a written application? Cool! Make your questions available in multiple formats and make it clear to applicants that you will accept their answers in whatever format they’d like to submit.
Want to learn about your applicant’s reasons for applying by asking for a concise cover letter? No problem! Allow job seekers the choice to communicate this information via a video clip, voice note, illustration, or beyond, which allows you to take in this information while perhaps also seeing their creativity and personality in action.
No matter what stage of the process you’re looking at, your system of hiring has more wiggle room than you may think.
5. Practice humility - candidates are interviewing you, too!
In work, as in life, the best matches are mutually exciting.
As we have already established that psychological safety leads to productive, free, and comfortable thinking among staff, a great place to build that trust, while making sure to land candidates that are 100% on board with your organization, is to reverse the interview process altogether and ensure a candidate feels able to assess your company, too.
Now before you shout it at your screen, we are not referring to the very standard part of the interview, typically at the very end after an anxiety-inducing back-and-forth, where the interview panel will ask: “Do you have any questions for us?"
Googling that question will help illustrate just how difficult candidates seem to find being put in this position, with thousands of articles and resources having been crafted to try and help applicants better manage it.
No, what we mean here is being intentional by making a candidate-to-company interview a standard part of your process, whether by embedding it into your typical interview structure (by asking candidates to develop a list of 3-5 questions that represent what they are most looking for in a place of work), or by adding in a new part of the process altogether where a candidate can conduct an interview with a member of your team.
The power imbalance between the applicant and the company they are applying to is slowly-but-surely evening out. Companies are beginning to realize the importance of “retention” beyond simply hiring, and workers have become increasingly “picky” in making sure they are working for a company that reflects their values.
In just one such example, a survey conducted by Hays Recruiting shows that 72% of millennial workers would feel deterred from a job if they were unable to see that the company was committed to diversity and inclusion.
Whether an applicant is deterred outright and turns down an offer because they aren’t able to discuss how important these factors are to their satisfaction, or whether they apprehensively accept with hope that these commitments do exist in the shadows, a free-flow of information in both directions serves to benefit everyone.
Anisha Phillips, a consultant with Feminuity in Toronto, ON, co-facilitated a session with us a few weeks ago on how to build inclusive businesses. During our session, she eloquently framed the hiring process as such:
“Companies need to realize that they aren’t hiring ‘talent’; they are hiring human beings with talent."
As we work to increasingly humanize and empower applicants in the recruiting process, and to help organizations build and maintain diverse, resilient, and creative teams, organizations ought to seize the opportunity to kick-start this process within their hiring and recruiting by practicing humility, encouraging applicants to properly assess their organization by asking intentional, pointed questions, and entering into more balanced relationships with every new hire that comes through the door.