Video
Businesses that recruit for diversity can benefit by prioritizing this effort and giving it their full attention. Raphael Mokades, founder and managing director of Rare Recruitment, outlines the four steps companies can take to execute a successful plan for diversity recruitment.
RAPHAEL MOKADES: The classic error employers make in diversity recruitment is to be slapdash, to be amateur, not to take it seriously. To do it without the rigor that they would bring to a competitive analysis or a pricing strategy or any other important business issue. Being very specific, the idea that you can do an event, take a box, get a photo, put it in your brochure, move on and say it's done—that's not how you're going to drive change in diversity recruitment or in anything else. The way to move the needle here is to be proactive, consistent, strategic and focused. If you do that, you're much more likely to get results.
If you want to do diversity-driven recruitment, there are four critical steps. Firstly measurement, then pipelining, then contextualization and finally inclusion. You measure because you understand the ways in which you are not diverse before you start seeking to bring about change. You pipeline because you focus on the people that you're not getting enough of—women, black people, Bangladeshi and Pakistani people, people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, whatever it might be—and you start engaging with them earlier, at the school or the beginning of their university careers.
Three, you contextualize. You put academic achievement in context. You also put behaviors as an assessment center in context. And finally, you include. So you change your culture so that it becomes an inclusive one.
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First published in mars 2019