One of the most common refrains we hear from companies we work with is that they don’t have a diverse enough team. This is probably a very familiar feeling to many of you. Feeling that as you look around your organization, diversity among the population is a pain point that you’ve not been able to fully wrap your arms around. And so a lot of companies come to us not just with a question about how to diversify their team, but also with other attending questions around what success actually looks like, what is reasonable for their environment, their industry, location, what’s a reasonable goal. And most importantly, how they accomplish it.

Feeling that as you look around your organization, diversity among the population is a pain point that you’ve not been able to fully wrap your arms around.

This bevy of questions actually underscores the pipeline issues that we see companies facing, which is that it’s unclear as to what success actually looks like, what they should be doing, etc. If you don’t have a diverse enough team, it could be a pipeline issue, it could be a hiring process issue, it could be a retention issue or an alumni issue, or it could even be a reflection of the community you live in or the industry in which you are operating -- something over which you have very little control.

Holistic has developed a comprehensive pipeline analysis process that allows us to help companies analyze and improve their pipeline process. Here’s how it works:

Step one: We establish the landscape.

We look at the types of jobs you have, the location in which you are operating, the industry in which you are operating, and we come up with some projections for what diversity at your company should look like. Or more aptly, could look like. We want to know what is a reasonable objective. If you live in a place that is not very diverse and you’re in an industry that’s not very diverse, expecting to snap your fingers and have an incredibly diverse team is probably not possible. Similarly, if you live in an extremely diverse place and you’re in an industry or you’re hiring for roles that have a lot of diversity to them, then you can expect to have a more diverse team.

Here’s another way of looking at it. HR roles in Chicago are roughly 2/3 women. So if you’re hiring for those roles, chances are you’re going to see a lot of female applicants. But if you’re seeing less than 2/3 applicants, you’re not even keeping up with the landscape, much less moving the needle on diversity. So there needs to be a real focus on looking at the specifics behind the companies rules and in the street and location using that to drive success in terms of your hiring pipeline.

Step two: Ensuring that people travel through the interview process fairly.

Holistic breaks up the interview process and the different phases of it, using your own process. This might include resume review, phone screen, in-person interviews, final interviews, hiring manager decision-making, offer-making, and, hopefully, offers being accepted. In every one of these phases, there’s an opportunity for diversity and inclusion to increase, drop off, or to be maintained. What you want to look at are specific places where bias might be introduced, where there might be some sort of issue with the information that’s protruding you for being successful in having a fair process. We have found all sorts of interesting things to do with this analysis. We found scenarios were a company’s resume review processes is eliminating all the diversity. We found scenarios where everything is fine until it gets to the offer stage and at the offer stage for whatever reason, all the diversity flies out of the process. And we found companies that have done an amazing job with stewarding diversity through their hiring process but are falling victim to a pipeline that is not diverse enough. Whatever the case may be, we want to identify the specific issue so we can help you solve it.

The final step: Onboarding and retention

In this phase of the process, we focus on what happened after the candidates actually accept their jobs and become staff. We measure a lot around onboarding, entrance into the organization, and retention. The idea is that if you are successful in diversifying your team by attracting people to be organized, we don’t want you to lose the value of all that diversity because there are retention problems or inclusion problems. We don’t want you to work so hard in diversifying your team only to squander that effort because your organization is not yet ready for the first team. We look at that as the third phase of the pipeline process; what happens when people actually make it all the way through.

If you’re facing challenges around diversity, then it’s in one of these three areas: either in your pipeline, your hiring process, or your onboarding and employee retention process. Holistic will help you to identify the specific place in which the challenge is happening, by looking at dozens of metrics spread across all these three different areas, and we will show you specifically where there are challenges that you need to address. Once these challenges are addressed, we will help you square them up and maintain success for the future.