What Any Employee Can Do to Make Diverse Hiring a Reality

So many companies pay lip service to diversity but do little to make it happen

Jessica Powell
Forge

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Illustration: Momo

Jessica Powell, the former Google vice president who wrote The Big Disruption and told you how to quit your job, is here to answer your common but tricky work questions. Check back every other week for more management advice with a tech inflection.

Hiring a diverse team is supposedly a priority for our small tech company, but the managers keep elevating the same candidate profile for a role. When I push back, they tell me they don’t have time to make diversity a priority for this role or to slow down to find a more diverse candidate pool. How do I convince them to prioritize diversity when there are competing priorities?

FFew things are more grating than watching companies pay lip service to diversity but do little in their hiring or retention practices that translate these good intentions into tangible results. They’ll put a picture of a diverse employee base on the jobs page of their website, but when employees point to the company’s poor diversity metrics, execs might answer that the pipeline of diverse candidates is small, or that they don’t want to “lower the bar” (ugh).

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