Diverse Talent Is Out There–It's Your Hiring Process That Needs Help

When it comes to DEI and general best recruiting practices, hiring diverse talent is essential. Period. No question. And that talent is out there, even though some companies claim there aren’t any diverse candidates applying to their jobs. In that case, you have to ask yourself “why is that?”

Fostering a more diverse hiring pipeline can be a critical challenge for companies. Using data to evaluate your current numbers and how candidates flow through your pipeline is critical to building effective strategies to increase equity and inclusion in your hiring practices–whether it is evaluating your job descriptions, your interview process, or something else entirely. We worked with ZS to implement our Holistic Hiring Pipeline Tool to do just this. We talked to Avery Smith, a member of ZS’s Inclusion & Diversity Center of Excellence team to provide some insight into their journey to make their hiring process more equitable.

ZS is a professional services firm with 10,000-plus employees, in more than 25 offices worldwide. “At ZS, our efforts around diversity, equity, and inclusion reflect our core values that drive everything we do: Treat people right, get it right and do the right thing,” Avery tells us. “We believe in inclusion and the importance of reflecting the diverse, interconnected world in which we live and work.”

The Holistic Hiring Pipeline is designed to address the problem of identifying how diversity flows through a company’s pipeline. The data we collect is meant to help understand a company’s success in having a fair and inclusive hiring process. The tool conveys contextual information to understand areas of success and opportunities for improvement in one succinct and easy-to-understand report that you can monitor over time.

We all know that having a diverse workforce is proven to lead to more productive, inclusive, and competitive workplaces–and not to mention greater employee satisfaction–but there’s not always a straight path to get there, or at least a lot of companies feel that way. It can be complicated when you break down each step of the recruitment process and their respective challenges.

“By making this data accessible to our recruiters, we hope it will empower them to lead diversity, equity, and inclusion focused conversations with their hiring managers and interview teams. The insights we learned from this tool helped us clearly define our 2021 and 2022 focus areas around recruiting and hiring.”

ZS ultimately decided that utilizing the Holistic Hiring Pipeline tool was the next step in their DEI journey. “It gave us an organized, vibrant view of our candidate pipeline data that we hadn’t had before,” says Avery. “Once we realized that the tool can show us where key areas of opportunity are (i.e. do we have an attraction, process or offer acceptance problem?), we knew it was necessary to push our recruiting goals forward.”

One of the unique features of the Hiring Pipeline Tool is how it delivers the data through an accessible, interactive dashboard. “The various filters make it so that every recruiter can find value from it. We gave our global recruiting team access to this tool, and we worked with the Holistic team to customize it to ensure that any recruiter at ZS can filter the data to get insight that is most meaningful to them and the roles/locations/people they support. This gives our recruiters transparency into their pipelines and encourages them to own the successes and areas of opportunity in just a few clicks.”

Take a look for yourself!

The sample tool shows separate sections for each demographic population. The left-hand column underneath those sections breaks down the hiring process from the initial application to the final offer. As you move across the row, you see the proportional increase or decrease from each stage of the process. You can choose the population you're examining through a combination of the descriptor demographic and filters. You can also specify the date range, department, job title, and source. Without applying filters, the tool shows the average breakdown of the full population across departments over time.

Is the Hiring Pipeline Tool right for everyone? “Absolutely,” Avery says. “From customizing the tool to fit our firm’s needs, to training our team how to use it, to helping us collect user feedback to make continuous improvements and draw actionable insights from the tool. I’d recommend this tool to any company that is prioritizing diversity recruiting efforts!”

In the end, companies should take advantage of the data they already have in their possession, which might be sitting there, unused. Wherever your organization is on its journey to improve its hiring and recruiting processes or general organizational DEI, the Hiring Pipeline Tool can help you assess those processes using empirical data to set and meet your goals. “By making this data accessible to our recruiters, we hope it will empower them to lead diversity, equity and inclusion focused conversations with their hiring managers and interview teams,” Avery explains. “The insights we learned from this tool helped us clearly define our 2021 and 2022 focus areas around recruiting and hiring, and Holistic was great at providing additional ideas and support around those.”

The talent is out there–you just have to dig deep and find it.

For more Holistic Hiring Pipeline Tool information and FAQs, visit our webpage.

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