B Work’s Guide for Diversity and Inclusion Hiring

Video Transcription

Welcome to the ultimate guide for diversity and inclusion hiring.

I’m James Bloemendal from B Work. I’d like to start with a story about one of our recent diversity hiring challenges.

We were hired to help with recruitment for multiple people to fill a particular entry level trade position in the energy industry.

The client was looking to hire any qualified person…but the applicant pool was predominantly male.

The client was hopeful to hire more women and guessed the barrier to that was the inappropriate comments women were likely to hear on some construction sites. The client has a welcoming and inclusive work culture, but they don’t control the environment of the construction sites that their employees work at.

This sparked a debate on our team: was it better to warn women candidates that they might face this kind of abuse? Or should we warn all men and women of the issues? Or in being proactive and potentially scaring away women, were we creating barriers to the full employment of women in the construction industry?

There were good arguments on all sides, and we didn’t settle on one answer. This is the challenge within so many diversity and inclusion issues – doing the right thing takes careful consideration of many factors, and many perspectives.

Over the last year, I’ve had the privilege of talking with more than 200 B Corps about their hiring processes. I’ve seen and heard inspiring practices from the community. I’ve also heard many questions from B Corps who want to be more inclusive but are looking for more information on how to do it.

At B Work, we’re lucky to have an expert in the area of diversity & inclusion hiring – our very own Luz Iglesias who will be sharing her extensive knowledge and experiences in this video blog series, along with some of the great examples we see other B Corps doing to improve the diversity of their companies.

I’ll turn it over to Luz, to explain what she’s going to deliver.

As B Corps, we all have something in common: the belief that business can be a force for good in our communities and the world.

One of the most significant ways that businesses achieve this is by giving people an opportunity to do meaningful work, in thoughtful, mission-driven companies.

But we also know that some kinds of people face more barriers to employment than others, and for reasons that have little to do with their work potential. Reasons like race, gender identity, age, religion, sexual orientation, history of incarceration, and physical ability.

You’re probably here because you’re a part of the B Corp Inclusion Challenge or maybe you just made a conscious decision to reduce barriers for meaningful employment for everyone in your community. Either way, we’re all for it.

You know you want to hire a high-performing and diverse team, but you might not have had the time, or you haven’t had the expertise, to investigate and reduce the barriers to employment in your hiring process.

Over the course of this video blog series, you’ll learn how to create an inclusive hiring process through job ads, job boards, and careers pages, and how to do objective screening and selection when you have several applicants to choose from.

You’ll also learn which selection methods work, and which are notorious for adverse impact on underrepresented groups. We’ll feature fellow B Corps who are inclusively and successfully hiring – so stay tuned and let us know if you have any best practices that we could feature.

Our goal with this video series is to help you become confident that you can broaden your talent pool, hire great people, and contribute to a world where each and every person has the chance to pursue meaningful work.

We’ll start our next video with how to write an inclusive and compelling job ad that will attract a diverse candidate pool.

The best way to follow along with this series is to sign up below. We’ll send you an email every two weeks with the next video. Below the videos we’ll include a transcription of the audio and more in depth notes about how to implement each step of the process we’re discussing. If you have questions or ideas you want to share with the community, join the discussion on the B Hive, and head to the Workplace Diversity & Inclusion group.

We’ll see you soon!