Diversity & Recruitment

1. 8th
GLOBAL DIVERSITY & INCLUSION SEMINAR
Barcelona, 27-28 February 2015
So Why Is It So Difficult to Improve Diversity
Recruiting?
Top Tips and Best Practices in Diverse Talent Sourcing
Strategies
Kate Grussing
Managing Director, Sapphire Partners
Copyright@2015 Sapphire Partners
All rights reserved

2. Senior diversity recruiting has been missing from the
D&I equation until recently

3. Why is it so difficult to increase diversity recruiting?
• Women’s representation growing but pipeline leaky
• What are most companies doing?
• What are the best companies doing?
• What not to do?
• Challenges and opportunities
• Myths
• Role of intermediaries
• Case studies
• Take-aways: the opportunity has never been better

4. Women’s representation in the labour force is
improving but…
Source: Women in the labour market – Full Report, Office for National Statistics UK, 23 September 2013

5. The representation of women in executive
roles remains low
Source: “Women Matter 2013: Gender Diversity in Top Management”, McKinsey & Company, 2013, p. 8

6. To date, there has been limited recruiting at a
senior level to help fill the leaky pipeline
Source: “Women Matter 2013: Gender Diversity in Top Management”, McKinsey & Company, 2013, p. 9

7. Extensive initiatives have focused on the challenges with
retention and promotion: Case study 30% Club research in UK
of 17 professional services firms

8. What are most companies doing
to improve diverse recruitment?
• Communicating to their recruiters and exec search firms their
D&I commitments
• Proactively recruiting women at graduate levels
• Leveraging employee referral networks
• Investing in myriad D&I initiatives
• Promoting their diverse leaders as role models
• Supporting affinity networks and leveraging for recruitment
• Tracking by gender recruitment, attrition, pay, promotions,
FWA, mat leave returners, …..
• Looking at potential for unconscious bias in their recruitment
and promotion processes
• Having a resourcing leader also own D&I

9. What are the best companies doing
to improve diverse recruitment?
• Reporting and sharing their D&I scorecards externally
and internally
• Setting targets for diversity at different levels
• Mandating search firms and recruiters to have diverse
short and long lists
• Developing maps of diverse candidates
• Retaining executive search firms with D&I expertise
• Re-engineering their recruitment processes
• Making opportunistic hires of diverse candidates
• Debriefing new hires on high potential diverse
candidates

10. What not to do in diversity recruiting?
• Accept/tolerate all male longlists without challenging lack of
diversity
• Have all male interview panels
• Ask candidates their age or marital status
• Impose unrealistic targets
• Treat all diverse candidates the same
• Expect advertising roles to lead to gender neutral
application rates
• Make a high profile senior diverse hire without broad
support in place
• Ignore the candidate “ecosystem” (partner, children, FWA,
eldercare, pro bono activities)
• Take a short term approach and expect results

11. Challenges & Opportunities: A virtuous circle

12. Myths in diverse recruiting
• Women are less ambitious
• Female pipeline is non-existent
• Money is less important to more diverse candidates
• Advertising for roles is diversity blind
• Recruiting men and women requires an equal approach
• Having a woman CEO/business leader makes diversity recruiting
easier

13. Important role of intermediaries:
Executive search firms and recruiters
• Most executive search firms have good representation of
women internally but that does not guarantee commitment
to diversity in search
• Some executive search firms are truly committed but many
are just giving lip service
• Some diversity specialist recruiters lack substance or track
records
• Search firm relationships can be very sticky and hard for
resourcing or D&I leaders to challenge
• Benchmarking internal candidates can help to confirm
women candidates competencies and readiness – but is rarely
utilised

14. Case Studies

15. Take-aways: Talent hungry companies need greater
strategic attention to diversity hiring
• Women candidates often below the radar
• Search firms and recruiters rarely invest in building candidate relationships
• Employee referral networks can result in homogeneous sourcing
• In-house recruiters can find female candidates harder to extract/more loyal
• The network effect of lateral hiring can advantage male candidates
• Few companies holding their search firms to account or experimenting with
new sources
The opportunity has never been better to recruit highly talented
diverse hires!