Use equity audits to expand a client's talent pool

Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in the workplace is a top priority for job seekers in the current talent-driven market, joining hybrid and remote work. According to a Deloitte survey, 80% of respondents valued inclusion when choosing an employer and 30% of millennials reported having already left an organization to work for a more inclusive one.  

Even in our own organization, we've seen that having a DEI program and employee resource groups (ERGs) has been a key differentiating factor for new hires choosing our company. What does inclusion look like for your client's employees? My best advice for company leaders and their advisers: Always ask, never assume.

One way to achieve this objective is through an equity audit, which should be conducted regularly to not only ensure racial and gender diversity, but also experiential and intellectual diversity. It can be leveraged to promote often overlooked talent in neurodiverse and veteran communities, as well as help create a multi-generational workplace.

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Equity audits are a comprehensive benchmarking tool that can be used to assess equity and inclusion broadly within an organization. According to Kate Slater, BUILD.org's national director of college success, conducting an equity audit is the best way to identify problem areas in hiring, retention and promotion of underrepresented populations. Audits identify gaps in equity data and help put that information into action.

How can an equity audit be conducted? A good starting point is to help your employer client gather demographic hiring and retention data, as well as human resources demographics. Consider these three questions along the way to doing that:

• How many employees of an underrepresented group has your organization hired in recent years and over the course of the company's history? 
• At what rates do employees of an underrepresented group get promoted? 
• Does the company have ERGs for underrepresented populations? 

It's important to ensure that not only are employees from underrepresented populations being given the initial opportunity to work for your company, but also that they are meaningfully achieving professional growth and have a solid community behind them that supports their growth in the process. 

To go about collecting more in-depth qualitative data with these questions in mind, your client can conduct anonymous internal surveys, facilitate focus groups and schedule interviews with leadership. It's important to gather insights from all rungs of the company ladder, as well as get the anecdotal context behind the numbers and percentages to pinpoint weaknesses and strengths in the existing company diversity policy. 

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After being equipped with these insights, change should follow. Someone should be designated to lead the evaluation of the data, or create an internal task force with cross-departmental stakeholders. From this point, your client can approach hiring outreach with more clarity and intention, broadening employment opportunities to promote neurodiversity and consider veteran and multi-generational onboarding. Realizing the strengths that each group can offer across teams and leadership and actively pursuing that talent will ensure that the company stays ahead.

Neurodiversity, which encompasses individuals with autism, attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, dyspraxia and dyslexia, represents a huge portion of untapped talent. It is estimated that 85% of people on the autism spectrum are unemployed, compared to 4.2% of the overall population. Variations in cognitive skills such as visual thinking, attention to detail and pattern recognition can all contribute to the creative process in ways that the rest of the team might not pick up on.

Another group that is commonly overlooked and would make a valuable asset to anyone's team is veterans. About 78% of HR professionals report veterans having matching or exceeding technical expertise, and 96% of HR professionals say veterans are specifically qualified to work through difficult and chaotic situations. Their unique resilience, leadership and teamwork skills, and adaptability allow them to thrive across entry-level and managerial roles. 

Ensuring the workplace is multi-generational is also crucial to the experiential and intellectual capital of your client's entire organization. Research shows that age correlates with workplace wisdom, with crystallized intelligence increasing even beyond the age of 80. A multi-generational team has more past experiences to inform critical workplace decisions and higher emotional intelligence to handle conflicts.

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To be sure, these diversity efforts are not to reduce people to numbers and categories. According to recruiting expert Jenn Tardy, increasing diversity on all fronts also means increasing the collective Lived Experience Intelligence, which is the varied ways we engage with life, the world and workplace. More combined experiences yield more informed decision-making, open doors for bigger networks and enhance professional life across the board.

Equity audits not only collect data, but also give companies the opportunity to ask employees what they need to feel supported and uplifted. That way, as new employees are recruited and onboarded, they can express their accommodation needs in real time to help them achieve their full productive and creative potential.

Companies run the risk of sabotaging their own growth and losing valuable employees if they don't revamp their diversity and inclusion recruiting efforts. It has been proven time and time again that diverse teams outperform their competition and drastically improve business outcomes, but diversity efforts also should aim for intellectual and experiential diversity, which are paramount to true professional fulfillment.