How to create a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive startup team
For every early stage company, the people on the team greatly influence that company’s trajectory. The right people can guide early stage companies to success, and diverse teams specifically, are shown to be more innovative, focused, and data driven. Despite this, modern day business still has large gaps in the opportunities, employment, and promotions within historically excluded groups. Historically excluded groups are those that have been excluded from full rights, privileges, and opportunities in a society or organization. For example, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, Pacific Islander, differently able bodied, are some subgroups who fall under those who are historically excluded.
At Hustle Hunters we work to connect more businesses with these historically excluded individuals because we know that a diverse team is a stronger team-and simply because it’s the right thing to do. After working with dozens of clients, we wanted to share some of our learnings on what it takes to create and foster a diverse, equitable, and inclusive (DEI) start-up team.
Want to listen to tips instead? Check out this hour breakdown of Hustle Hunters on Aaron Caulfield’s podcast.
Before you start hiring
By the time you’re ready to hire, you may want to jump into the process right away, but taking a bit of time to plan and consider ultimately will create a better process and experience for your candidates.
Do some research
Recruiting and supporting DEI is not a new phenomenon- you do not have to reinvent the wheel! In fact, there are tons of resources out there. Doing some research ahead of time can help get you and your team acquainted and aware of people’s experiences to inform your own process.
LinkedIn is a great resource to find groups, events, and webinars. You may also want to consider catering your LinkedIn by connecting with leaders of DEI, posting in groups or on your page.
*Common pitfall
If you reshare knowledge from a DEI practitioner on your platform, make sure to tag that person to evaluate their work.
If you choose to have a conversation with a DEI practitioner, offer compensation for their knowledge regardless if they ask you for your budget or not.
If you want to show your advocacy, historically excluded talent is looking beyond performance work. If you are just getting started, it’s ok to be honest but be ready to share what’s in the works to make your organization welcoming and sustainable for historically excluded talent.
The above actions can lead to higher trust in a community who talk to each other. What are they saying about your organization?
1) Take a baseline of company demographics
You have to start somewhere and knowing your company's demographics is a crucial step for hiring a diverse team. You can’t get closer to knowing what gaps should be addressed if you haven’t accounted for them in the first place.
2) Define the role
To create the best experience for the candidate and hire the right fit, you need a job description that’s clear. You’ll also want to determine multiple paths that a potential candidate might take to arrive at the position. Being too narrow in your expectations of candidates background can create unconscious or conscious layers of bias that impact hiring.
*Common pitfall
Hiring someone that has taken the same path as yourself (i.e. maybe same type of college, or job background, etc.) or has a similar personality and life experience can quickly create a homogenous work culture and company.
Looking to learn more tips about what to do before hiring? Consider these three steps!
While interviewing
Recruiting historically excluded groups takes commitment. Unconscious bias and systemic racism interplay in company culture often, thus it’s important to consider these factors and create a system that addresses them.
1) Define attributes or values you are looking for
When you take the time to assign attributes or values such as hardworking, creative, or collaborative, you can help combat unconscious bias by pinpointing hiring teams to know what they are or aren’t looking for.
For example, instead of using unspecific language like, “I thought they were a good fit”, your team has specific language like “I thought their experience highlighted their hardworking nature.” Tools like Searchlight allow you to align on soft skills before doing a search and then confirm for top candidates through data-driven reference checks. This can be especially helpful for DEI recruiting as it helps your team assess candidate’s skills and how they translate to different roles.
2) Give space for company culture questions
Although you can’t explicitly ask identity questions, you can make it clear how your company supports different identities and situations. For example, perhaps highlight certain benefits, like saying we have mental health benefits and support mental health days. By highlighting certain ways you support culture, you create space for the candidate to ask questions and tell you what they care about in company culture.
3) Create a follow-up and tracking system
If you don’t have a process for how you will track and follow up with candidates, the time you invested throughout the process might go to waste. Even if this is just an excel sheet - will make a huge difference in ensuring that nothing falls through the cracks. #nojudgement
*Common pitfall
Losing candidates due to not contacting them during the process, or scheduling the follow-up way after the initial interview.
After hiring-- evolving for DEI
To create a truly diverse, equitable, and inclusive work culture and company, you will need to continue to evolve your practices. The practice of improving DEI ensures you get closer to a more DEI centric team.
1) Keep educating yourself
As we mentioned, there are lots of resources out there- be it podcasts, webinars, blogs, ebooks etc. Continuing your DEI education is important to determine new ways you can support and foster DEI at your company.
Webinar: Building a rich and ready pipeline to meet diversity goals
Podcast: How to create a diverse, equitable and inclusive startup team
2) Continue to assess company demographics
Although one hire is super exciting, it’s not when the work ends. Continuing to assess company demographics helps you understand where gaps are, and where turnover is happening.
3) Create support systems for the people you hired
It’s more than just hiring historically excluded groups, it’s creating the culture and systems that will help them thrive and stay at your company. This can be a wide gamut of things including; employee resource groups (ERG), benefits, educational programming, professional development opportunities, flexible work culture etc.
*Common pitfall
Often early-stage companies don’t invest in benefits or take the time to create policy, which can lead to quicker turnover and ultimately more expense for the company.
Although not common, we highly recommend hiring a DEI leader ASAP to lead those efforts. Oftentimes these professionals are brought onboard to untangle a mess rather than creating a foundation to prevent pitfalls.
Companies wait for, for example, their first Indigenous person to get hired to create an ERG for Indigenous people. A good placeholder is to have an advocate start an ERG and when more people come on board, they can replace themselves with talent that better represents that respective ERG. This gives the indigenous person a jumping-off point and it showcases support they didn’t have to ask for.
Want to learn more about how to integrate DEI into your hiring process? Let’s chat!