Well, one thing that won’t help is having one woman or one person of colour in the candidate pool.
In this Harvard Business Review article, Stefanie K. Johnson, David R. Hekman and Elsa T Chan report how roughly 85% of board members and executives are white men. This means that despite growing pressure to increase diversity, most companies haven’t tried to change.
This is particularly problematic when we consider that people have a bias to preserve the status quo – i.e., avoid change and stick with what we know. This means sticking with candidates who match the status quo.
The research
The authors conducted research that demonstrates a powerful tool to help mitigate the status quo bias. When two or more women or people of colour are included in the pool of finalists when recruiting, the status quo changes, resulting in the woman or person of colour becoming the favourite candidate.
Specifically, when there were two or more female finalists, the odds of hiring a women were 79.14 times greater.
When there were two or more people of colour in the finalist pool, the odds of hiring a person of colour were 193.72 times greater.
The authors suggest that having greater representation in the candidate pool, appears to challenge the status quo bias and the data shows that it significantly increases the chances of hiring against the status quo.
Implications for practice
These findings emphasise the importance of ensuring recruiters attract a diverse candidate pool. Techniques to achieve this can include:
- Ensuring that your job advert minimises bias, for example in the language used to describe the post and the ideal candidate.
- Considering the variety of places you advertise your job role.
- Keeping job adverts open until a critical mass of applications from both female candidates and candidates of colour are achieved.
You can read the full article here
