Building an Audience/Applicant Pool Intentionally and In Real-Time
One time when I was working in communications for Mayor Rahm Emanuel, I was riding to work with my wife, and I remember being very nervous. She asked me what was wrong, and I said, "I am anticipating a story coming out today about the mayor, and I think it's going to be bad." She basically said, "Well, you tried your hardest to have it turn out well, right?" And I said, "Yeah." And she said, "So that's really all that you can do. You can't control what the media writes."
Technically, she’s right. This, however, demonstrated a misunderstanding of the job I had. If you work in communications, you are accepting the fact that somehow, someway, you are going to actually try and control the outcome of something that you seemingly have limited or no control over. Yes, it is true that you are not producing the final output. But to do that job you can't absolve yourself of responsibility over what the final output looks like.
This is something that a lot of people who enter the communications world never fully understand. And, to me, it is fundamental if you want to be successful in that space. As my career has evolved toward diversity and inclusion, I have found many, many places where this topic re-emerges and has a lot of relevance.
There is a tremendous part of the whole diversity and inclusion landscape that relies on companies and leaders taking responsibility for things that they otherwise might not have felt a lot of responsibility for.
Read that again because it is critical. You cannot be successful in DEI if you don’t accept at least some of the responsibility for things outside your control.
But how can I control who applies for a job? What impacts do I have on who is going to come to my event? All I can do is put it out there, and then we'll see who shows up. Right? I can't be held responsible for society! I'm just going to hire the best person for the position.
These are all common refrains in the diversity and inclusion space, and they all contain one subtle theme in common, which is that the individual who is stating them is absolving themselves of some of the responsibility for the outcome based on the circumstances of the situation. And they're reasonable to do so because just like within the communications example, the outcome is not 100 percent in their control.
However, there is an opportunity here. Which is if you willingly choose to take responsibility for the situation, you can actually get a better outcome.
Here's how we do it at Holistic.
Take, for example, an event, and you want to have a diverse audience for that event. We undertake a four-step process at Holistic. The four steps are: setting goals in advance, installing an if-then statement, measuring in real-time, and changing your behavior based on the outcome of those measurements.
The first step is to set a goal. You have to have a goal, and the goal has to be real. If you're having an event, a certain percentage of the audience should meet an inclusion standard. If you're dealing with a job application, you should have a percentage of candidates that you want to have meet a diversity or an inclusion standard. These goals need to be reasonable, set beforehand, and made public.
The second thing that you want to do is you want to have an if-then statement. What I mean by an if-then statement is if we fail at our goal, then what happens? I'll give you an example. When I was at 1871 we had a program for Hispanic entrepreneurs. In the first and second year, we had a very low amount of women apply for the class.
One of the women from the first class came into my office, extremely upset about this. And I said, "What do you want me to do if not that many women apply?" And she said, "I want you to make a commitment that if you don't have a representative sample of women, then you will hold off on starting the class until you find a 50/50 representation of women." This floored me. This was really an interesting idea.
It should be noted that this is not an idea that we pursued, but that doesn't mean that it was wrong. In fact, as I thought about it over the years, she was exactly 100% right. This is totally what we should have done. We should've put in place an if-then statement so that we didn't have to make a real-time decision about what to do. So that's the second phase, putting together an if-then statement.
The third phase then is to take some measurement points. And the measurement points need to happen while whatever you're doing is in progress, not afterward. Halfway through the process or a quarter of the way through the process, you need to take a litmus test of the diversity and inclusion of your applicants so that you know how to proceed.
If you are not meeting your goals, then you refer to your if-then statements. For example, if we don’t have enough African-American applicants, then we need to reach out to the Chicago Urban League to try and generate more African-American applicants. If we end up with a final candidate pool that only has men in it, then we are going to go back to the beginning stages of the process and start all over and focus more on people. It's no longer guessing or trying to decide if you've done sufficient work. It's actually reacting to the data that you have.
The last phase is tailoring your behavior. Once you have the feedback about how well you're doing in relation to your goals or if-then statements, then you have a suite of different actions that you can take. For example, if you identify in an event process your audience is not diverse enough halfway through, then you need to focus your attention on attracting a more diverse population for the rest of the time.
What we've been known to do at Holistic is to actually shut down our main invitation and instead set up a separate invitation that we distribute only to community groups, organizations like the Urban League or the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce or other diversity-focused groups. The result is that in real-time you are building an audience intentionally.
The same thing can be said for an applicant pool. If you stop at a certain phase in the process and evaluate how well you're doing, and you determine that you have a lower amount of a certain population than you need, then you can take real-time actions to improve the population that you are inviting for the interviews.
This is it. This is a four-step process that allows you to actually become proactive instead of reactive. It allows you to affect the outcome of a situation that you previously felt like you didn't even have any control over. Many organizations aren't even measuring their results. What you'll be doing is not only measuring your results but measuring your real-time activities with an intentionality towards your results. This is really exciting for a variety of different reasons, and it's applicable across the landscape of diversity and inclusion.
To talk more about this with us, please contact us. We’d love to hear your thoughts!
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