Start with the interview
To find people with diverse backgrounds and experiences, you need to get to know job candidates beyond surface-level information. Unfortunately, the interview process for many companies doesn’t go beyond the surface when it comes to a candidate’s personal background.
“You need to spend as much time talking about their life experiences as their academic experiences,” Camden says. “What were their biggest challenges, how did they find their way into college, what were their difficulties in getting to college and being successful. You have to work with your HR department to find out what questions you can and can’t ask, but I think that we tend to gloss over background questions very quickly in the interview process.”
Camden allocates a larger portion of interviews for getting to know job candidates on a more personal level.
“I’m setting myself up so that a third of the interview is about their background and life experiences,” he says. “I do that because in my experiences when I’ve been sought after for a job, it’s basically,
‘Tell me something about yourself,’ and you typically answer, ‘I was born here, I went to this college, I studied this and my job is X and Y.’ All we really do when someone asks us to tell us something about ourselves is give a short summary of what is already on the resume. Then, the interviewer checks off the box and moves on to, ‘Tell me about your first job.’
“We don’t ask questions like, ‘How did you decide what college you were going to go to, how many majors did you have along the way before you settled down to become a journalism major, a biology major, and what made you change from one to the next?’”
Camden says human resources departments are coached to stay away from drilling down on personal information because it ventures too close to subjects like race, ethnicity and other areas that might open to door to questions that could be viewed as probing or even discriminatory.
It’s no secret that race and ethnicity are potentially touchy subjects around which you and your HR team should tread carefully during the interview process, but you shouldn’t go180 degrees in the other direction. Camden says that if you remain too distant from getting to know a candidate on a personal level, you’re staying in a comfort zone. That can lead your company to hire people based on familiarity and comfort level, which can be bad news if you’re trying to build a diverse work force.
“Your ears should perk up anytime someone in the company says, ‘Isn’t it amazing that we all …,’ whatever that ‘all’ is,” he says. “‘Isn’t it amazing that we all went to the same school, all play golf, all belong to the same club,’ whatever it is. That’s a sign that the backgrounds of your people might be too homogenized.
“I was fortunate to have a boss very early on who, at a time when everyone at the top ranks of business played golf, asked me if I played golf. I said no, figuring that was going to be a negative response to him, and he said ‘Great. We need a nongolfer around here. That’s all they talk about around here is golf, so you make certain you talk about something else and bring in another perspective.’”
Camden says that when recruiting for a position, finding different backgrounds and perspectives should be more important than finding a comfortable fit.
“We, as leaders, have just got to stop telling our recruiters that a comfortable fit is the No. 1 criteria,” he says. “I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been called when someone is recruiting folks or pitching to folks and it all comes back to that comfortable fit.
“Tell me they believe the same core values we believe, that they possess a high sense of integrity, that’s fine. But when the pitch is all about the comfortable fit, it really has to be setting off some alarm bells. That can’t be first or second on the list we’re feeding our recruiters. It’s not rocket science; it’s a matter of raising the idea of diversity further up in the priority set.”
