How to improve your odds of hiring Black Professionals, PART I: Baseline

This research memo looks at lesser known issues and solutions for companies to increase chances of hiring more Black professionals.

Why this Memo?

Anecdotally problems re: hiring black employees keep popping up. From Google’s struggles, to Black employees at Facebook speaking on their position.

And according to meta-analysis from 2017, discrimination against African-Americans in hiring field experiments didn’t decline from 1990 to 2015.

“It is often suggested that prejudice and discrimination fade out over time through a gradual process of liberalization of attitudes,” says Lincoln Quillian, professor of sociology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern. “But we found striking stability in discrimination against African- Americans.(1)

While there are many practices and some results are there, to further enhance chances, GapJumpers shines a light on lesser known issues and solutions, that might hamper and help efforts to hire Black professionals.

This memo looks at the following issues:

1. Baseline: what is the corporate experience for black professionals?
2. Recruitment: how to improve communication with Black professionals?
3. Pre-selection: how to improve selection chances for Black professionals?
4. Referrals: what can be done to improve odds for Black professionals?
5. Implications for your organization.

Part I: The baseline experience for black professionals.

To start off with we’d like to highlight three papers to set the context of what issues Black professionals face and experience.

Firstly did you know that the status of black workers informs their perception of workplace discrimination and bias?

Intuitively it might make sense, yet to be conscious of this and how it impacts recruitment & retainment might be a step that most have not yet taken.

The above table is from research conducted by amongst others Adia Harvey Wingfield, the Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor of Arts & Sciences.(2)

“This study breaks new ground by showing that black workers who are highly positioned in an organization see different kinds of racial discrimination than those closer to the bottom”

“Black doctors, who are highly placed in the hierarchy of health care facilities, focus much more on structural and organizational discrimination — educational disparities, biases in hiring policies,” Harvey Wingfield said.

“In contrast, black nurses, who occupy a lower place in the hierarchy, observe both organizational and individual racial discrimination. They, too, focus on biases in hiring, but are also attuned to personal discrimination from supervisors.

Black technicians, who are still lower in the organizational hierarchy, mostly describe individual discrimination. They see how supervisors discriminate against black technicians, but are not privy to how organizational rules create widespread differences for black workers.

Secondly a recent study(3), by the Center for Talent Innovation: Being Black in Corporate America: An Intersectional Exploration, looks at the corporate experience of black employees at large and small corporations.

The report lays out the following findings amongst others:

• Black professionals are nearly four times as likely as white professionals to say they have experienced racial prejudice at work (58% versus 15%).
• Regional differences are stark: 79% of black professionals in Midwest say they experienced racial prejudice at work, compared to 66% of black professionals in the West, 56% in the South, and 44% in Northeast.
• 43% of black executives have had colleagues use racially insensitive language in their presence.
• Black women are less likely to have access to the same support and advocacy as white women. For instance, 35% of white women have individuals in their networks who advocated for their ideas and skills, to 19% of black women.
• Only 40% of employees of all races think their companies have effective diversity and inclusion programs.
• More than a third of black employees intend to leave their company within two years.
• Small companies (<100 employees) offer value to black professionals that might not be met in large companies, such as:

A sense of belonging

Direct client access

Ability to implement own ideas

Trust with colleagues

Respect for your contributions

Key questions to consider:

How are we keeping up to date with specific research around Black professionals to better inform our practices and actions?

Depending on the type of roles we want to rebalance, different candidate priorities exist. How does our recruitment effort incorporate this notion?

How do our inclusion programs ensure that values held high by black professionals are met and are seen as credible?

What conversations should we have today, to not potentially lose black employees, and create unintended credibility issues for future recruitment?

References:

1. https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2017/september/research-finds-entrenched-hiring-bias-against-african-americans/
2. https://source.wustl.edu/2020/01/black-workers-status-informs-perceptions-of-workplace-racial-discrimination/
3. https://www.talentinnovation.org/_private/assets/BeingBlack-KeyFindings-CTI.pdf

Read PART II on How to improve your odds of hiring Black Professionals.