Startups

Use radical objectivity to create and retain an inclusive workforce

Comment

Illustration of four people finishing a puzzle to represent assembling and retaining an inclusive workforce.
Image Credits: Malte Mueller (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

James Nash

Contributor

James Nash is CEO and founder of inBeta, a tech-enabled talent specialist using data, social listening and human science to help corporations overcome bias.

Today, the age of corporate social justice is dawning. With the business case for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) now more vital than ever, we’re beginning to see organizations truly embrace social activism.

And while social justice was, rightly, the initial impetus, companies are finally waking up to the business case for diversity initiatives. Recent research by McKinsey shows that organizations with the most ethnically diverse teams are 36% more likely to financially outperform those with the least. This is because diversity increases revenue, boosts innovation, sparks creativity and leads to better decision-making.

But the truth is, the more diversity you have, the more challenging it can be.

The problem is that business leaders and diversity advocates have failed to consider an approach to diversity that goes beyond “add diversity and stir.” Diversity is not a numbers game wherein the solution is to merely increase the numbers of traditionally underrepresented groups in your workforce.

Now, as the world adjusts following the pandemic, it’s time to stop pretending that outdated diversity programs work. So let’s explore some of the measures leaders can take to root out bias and subjectivity from the outset, and instead adopt an approach of “radical objectivity” — combining data and human science to ensure that talent and merit win every time.

Inclusion is about more than hitting diversity recruiting optics

Diversity in the workplace starts with an inclusive culture. Unfortunately, many companies get this wrong. This is because diversity is quantitative — it’s the extent of heterogeneity within your workforce. On the other hand, inclusion describes the experiences of different individuals in the workforce and the degree to which they’re invited to participate.

Delivering on inclusion, therefore, is about more than hitting diversity recruiting optics. Done right, an inclusive culture should help to foster a sense of belonging and shared values. By arming themselves with data and insight instead of diversity quotas, forward-thinking organizations can create an environment in which individuals of all backgrounds can thrive.

So how do they get there?

It starts with language

Diversity initiatives often fail because they land too late in the employee journey to have a lasting impact. Change needs to be embedded in the talent acquisition process, which means evolving the way that you engage with your prospective employees — starting with language.

The words you choose to bring your business to life will make the difference: Words are influential ambassadors of your workplace’s culture. Technology and data analysis can help you here, providing robust insights on the messages you’re sending.

For example, are you using gender-coded or inclusive-coded language to attract inclusion-minded people? Are you taking the time to update your communications regularly to make sure they’re understanding of different cultural contexts — not just gender and ethnic but organizational and generational, too?

And it’s not just the language that you use in your marketing that matters. Have you considered the words used by your hiring managers and recruiters? At Inbeta, we use technology that enables organizations to move beyond the basics when it comes to inclusion.

For example, we bury specific questions in our recruitment interviews, the answers to which can be linguistically analyzed to understand the genuine values and behaviors of candidates, recruiters and hiring managers. This means you no longer need to rely on simplistic “bias checker” software, which tends to be based on outdated research with few controls on data integrity.

Remember, the best candidates have options. So what will you say that makes them want to work for you?

Moving past preconceptions

It’s also essential to bear in mind that, when it comes to language, it works both ways. When deciding whether to hire someone, we need to move past conceptions of how the ideal candidate should talk. That, too, leads to homogeneity. Technology and training in tandem can help with that.

At Inbeta, we recently partnered with a prominent high-street retailer to recruit a board director and encountered in our search a prominent candidate from a working-class background. However, the initial assumption from their tone and the way they articulated was that they had got to their accomplished position through “grit” and “graft” and lacked the strategic capability required for the new role.

Our linguistic intelligence coupled with human expertise surfaced early on that this was not the case and allowed us to counteract the biases at play. We were able to advocate for the individual and design a bespoke coaching intervention that raised the profile within the process, showcasing objective potential and ensuring they were given an equitable chance. The individual is now in the final stage, despite the disadvantage their socioeconomic background would have otherwise caused them.

Looking where others wouldn’t (or couldn’t)

Traditional approaches are too static to uncover all the potential that’s out there.

A standard executive search process will typically entail significant manual desk research reviewing historical databases that are only as up-to-date as the day each CV was written. Failing that, you’re at the mercy of the headhunter’s black book of acquaintances — or perhaps a combination of the two. Either way, the process is far from efficient, let alone equitable.

We use a suite of technologies that allows us to identify “hidden” talent without relying on either approach. We’re currently working with a leading fashion brand to hire a customer and digital director, for example, and the use of our tools has meant that we’ve been able to rapidly deliver a long list of 74 high-priority real-time candidates within 48 hours.

This is a potential talent pool that would take more traditional search processes weeks to develop — and that’s before validation. Not only are we able to map candidates quickly and efficiently, by leveraging technology, we can independently execute due diligence to quantify these leads: Are they exhibiting typical job-seeking behaviors? What are their cultural drivers? Do they have the desired leadership qualities?

This isn’t just about speed and efficiency — although, of course, that’s a bonus — this is, crucially, about surfacing candidates that would usually be overlooked in the search process.

Moving beyond cultural fit

In tackling unconscious bias, it’s also worth considering what a truly inclusive approach to talent acquisition looks like. Companies have long hired for “cultural fit,” but there’s a tremendous amount of bias in these mindsets.

By aiming to hire people whose attributes mesh with the company’s goals and values, your resulting workplace is one in which everyone looks, thinks and acts alike. Instead, organizations must move away from a practice that aims to mold people to fit their norms.

There’s a recent story that always springs to mind. In the run-up to the pandemic, I was working with a significant multinational retail group to source a group chief digital officer as part of a very high-profile board restructure.

The individual we surfaced had no fashion experience and limited retail experience. Furthermore, their mindset couldn’t have been further from that of the existing C-suite, meaning they would have been entirely overlooked by the majority of headhunters. But, on the other hand, this individual had outstanding digital expertise, a career spanning innovation across several FTSE100 companies. And on top of all this, they’d been operating as a digital nomad in remote central Africa.

Their technical proficiency, coupled with their incredibly diverse mindset, meant that they were the perfect person to revolutionize a very traditional organization. But they simply wouldn’t have been identified had we been seeking out somebody who was a so-called “cultural fit.” By getting past the cultural fit default, companies are far more likely to build teams with the diversity of mindset, experience, ethnicities and backgrounds that they claim to be seeking.

Rewiring the system

Ultimately, taking a holistic view of diversity means looking beyond numbers; a tick-the-box program doesn’t cut it.

Cultural change is challenging, perhaps even more so when the objective is creating an inclusive culture. But without a concerted effort to change organizational culture and foster inclusion, diversity initiatives are likely to fail.

The easiest way to address this is to re-examine your hiring process with a radically objective approach. Companies today need to leverage technology and data to mitigate implicit bias wherever they can and match that with human touch and cultural intelligence. The route to diversity success is to perpetually listen, adapt and develop.

More TechCrunch

Jasper Health, a cancer care platform startup, laid off a substantial part of its workforce, TechCrunch has learned.

General Catalyst-backed Jasper Health lays off staff

Live Nation says its Ticketmaster subsidiary was hacked. A hacker claims to be selling 560 million customer records.

Live Nation confirms Ticketmaster was hacked, says personal information stolen in data breach

Featured Article

Inside EV startup Fisker’s collapse: how the company crumbled under its founders’ whims

An autonomous pod. A solid-state battery-powered sports car. An electric pickup truck. A convertible grand tourer EV with up to 600 miles of range. A “fully connected mobility device” for young urban innovators to be built by Foxconn and priced under $30,000. The next Popemobile. Over the past eight years, famed vehicle designer Henrik Fisker…

2 hours ago
Inside EV startup Fisker’s collapse: how the company crumbled under its founders’ whims

Late Friday afternoon, a time window companies usually reserve for unflattering disclosures, AI startup Hugging Face said that its security team earlier this week detected “unauthorized access” to Spaces, Hugging…

Hugging Face says it detected ‘unauthorized access’ to its AI model hosting platform

Featured Article

Hacked, leaked, exposed: Why you should never use stalkerware apps

Using stalkerware is creepy, unethical, potentially illegal, and puts your data and that of your loved ones in danger.

3 hours ago
Hacked, leaked, exposed: Why you should never use stalkerware apps

The design brief was simple: each grind and dry cycle had to be completed before breakfast. Here’s how Mill made it happen.

Mill’s redesigned food waste bin really is faster and quieter than before

Google is embarrassed about its AI Overviews, too. After a deluge of dunks and memes over the past week, which cracked on the poor quality and outright misinformation that arose…

Google admits its AI Overviews need work, but we’re all helping it beta test

Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje‘s weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. In…

Startups Weekly: Musk raises $6B for AI and the fintech dominoes are falling

The product, which ZeroMark calls a “fire control system,” has two components: a small computer that has sensors, like lidar and electro-optical, and a motorized buttstock.

a16z-backed ZeroMark wants to give soldiers guns that don’t miss against drones

The RAW Dating App aims to shake up the dating scheme by shedding the fake, TikTok-ified, heavily filtered photos and replacing them with a more genuine, unvarnished experience. The app…

Pitch Deck Teardown: RAW Dating App’s $3M angel deck

Yes, we’re calling it “ThreadsDeck” now. At least that’s the tag many are using to describe the new user interface for Instagram’s X competitor, Threads, which resembles the column-based format…

‘ThreadsDeck’ arrived just in time for the Trump verdict

Japanese crypto exchange DMM Bitcoin confirmed on Friday that it had been the victim of a hack resulting in the theft of 4,502.9 bitcoin, or about $305 million.  According to…

Hackers steal $305M from DMM Bitcoin crypto exchange

This is not a drill! Today marks the final day to secure your early-bird tickets for TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 at a significantly reduced rate. At midnight tonight, May 31, ticket…

Disrupt 2024 early-bird prices end at midnight

Instagram is testing a way for creators to experiment with reels without committing to having them displayed on their profiles, giving the social network a possible edge over TikTok and…

Instagram tests ‘trial reels’ that don’t display to a creator’s followers

U.S. federal regulators have requested more information from Zoox, Amazon’s self-driving unit, as part of an investigation into rear-end crash risks posed by unexpected braking. The National Highway Traffic Safety…

Feds tell Zoox to send more info about autonomous vehicles suddenly braking

You thought the hottest rap battle of the summer was between Kendrick Lamar and Drake. You were wrong. It’s between Canva and an enterprise CIO. At its Canva Create event…

Canva’s rap battle is part of a long legacy of Silicon Valley cringe

Voice cloning startup ElevenLabs introduced a new tool for users to generate sound effects through prompts today after announcing the project back in February.

ElevenLabs debuts AI-powered tool to generate sound effects

We caught up with Antler founder and CEO Magnus Grimeland about the startup scene in Asia, the current tech startup trends in the region and investment approaches during the rise…

VC firm Antler’s CEO says Asia presents ‘biggest opportunity’ in the world for growth

Temu is to face Europe’s strictest rules after being designated as a “very large online platform” under the Digital Services Act (DSA).

Chinese e-commerce marketplace Temu faces stricter EU rules as a ‘very large online platform’

Meta has been banned from launching features on Facebook and Instagram that would have collected data on voters in Spain using the social networks ahead of next month’s European Elections.…

Spain bans Meta from launching election features on Facebook, Instagram over privacy fears

Stripe, the world’s most valuable fintech startup, said on Friday that it will temporarily move to an invite-only model for new account sign-ups in India, calling the move “a tough…

Stripe curbs its India ambitions over regulatory situation

The 2024 election is likely to be the first in which faked audio and video of candidates is a serious factor. As campaigns warm up, voters should be aware: voice…

Voice cloning of political figures is still easy as pie

When Alex Ewing was a kid growing up in Purcell, Oklahoma, he knew how close he was to home based on which billboards he could see out the car window.…

OneScreen.ai brings startup ads to billboards and NYC’s subway

SpaceX’s massive Starship rocket could take to the skies for the fourth time on June 5, with the primary objective of evaluating the second stage’s reusable heat shield as the…

SpaceX sent Starship to orbit — the next launch will try to bring it back

Eric Lefkofsky knows the public listing rodeo well and is about to enter it for a fourth time. The serial entrepreneur, whose net worth is estimated at nearly $4 billion,…

Billionaire Groupon founder Eric Lefkofsky is back with another IPO: AI health tech Tempus

TechCrunch Disrupt showcases cutting-edge technology and innovation, and this year’s edition will not disappoint. Among thousands of insightful breakout session submissions for this year’s Audience Choice program, five breakout sessions…

You’ve spoken! Meet the Disrupt 2024 breakout session audience choice winners

Check Point is the latest security vendor to fix a vulnerability in its technology, which it sells to companies to protect their networks.

Zero-day flaw in Check Point VPNs is ‘extremely easy’ to exploit

Though Spotify never shared official numbers, it’s likely that Car Thing underperformed or was just not worth continued investment in today’s tighter economic market.

Spotify offers Car Thing refunds as it faces lawsuit over bricking the streaming device

The studies, by researchers at MIT, Ben-Gurion University, Cambridge and Northeastern, were independently conducted but complement each other well.

Misinformation works, and a handful of social ‘supersharers’ sent 80% of it in 2020

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! Okay, okay…

Tesla shareholder sweepstakes and EV layoffs hit Lucid and Fisker