S4 E93 | eXpertease: Glenn Gutmacher talks diverse slates for success

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Chris Hoyt, CXR 0:22
Hello sports fans. I’m Chris Hoyt CXR president and today’s quarterback for the next 15 minutes as we kick off this segment of the CareerXroads podcast if you haven’t listened or watched or been part of our eXpertease program before you’re in for a treat today, I’m connecting with an industry leader almost every week to talk about one thing they’d like you to know one thing they wish their younger self knew when victory when defeat or life lesson learned. And that’s ideally beneficial for you and your career. Now, if you’ve managed to get to the stadium live, you can jump in with a question of your own. And if we can, we’ll try to answer it. But don’t worry if we were in a time on the clock because you’ll find that posted in the free and public forums we host over at CXR.work/talenttalks. As you probably already know, these topics are gleaned from a list built around the results of our CXR 2021 talent acquisitions priorities research, where hundreds of fit leaders and practitioners weighed in on what was important to them this year, that report is free to anybody that would like to give the results to look and can be found within the research and Reports section. Let’s see if that works. So let’s get this game started. Joining me today is Glenn Gutmacher. Glenn, how are you?

Glenn Gutmacher 1:26
Hey. All right.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 1:29
Hey, it’s good to see you. Bit. I love you Glenn. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Who are you? What do you do? Where are you working? Where you going? What’s going on with you?

Glenn Gutmacher 1:39
Sure. Well, I’ve been doing talent sourcing for over 20 years now and just wrapped up a five and a half year stint at State Street, a large global bank running their global sourcing function with a focus on diversity and five years previous to that was running something similar for a tech firm. And so I’m looking for my next gig actually.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 2:01
Yeah, okay. Well, hopefully we can get the word out there that you’re ready to move. I do fun trivia. Fun, Glenn. trivia fact, a lot of people don’t know this. You were actually in a previous life, a contributor to a participant of a series, a book series that CXR and put out Yes?

Glenn Gutmacher 2:18
Yeah, I actually created the job board for a newspaper chain here in New England back in the late 90s. And so Gerry, heard about it. And that job board called Job Smart at the time ended up being in the book.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 2:32
Nice. That’s your fun trivia for the day. Sorry, listeners. So look good. You and I recently did a workshop on building out diverse candidate slates. Right. And we know that that’s kind of been a topic within our space, but just share share with the listeners your perspective of why that was an important topic for us to cover.

Glenn Gutmacher 2:54
Sure, well I mean, diversity is often discussed in the context of doing the right thing, which is great. And that’s ideally how we should look at it. But in practice, particularly in a traditional corporate workplace, we need to press other levers if we want to make change happen. And diverse candidate interview slates is one of those known to have an impact.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 3:15
So what would you say, given that we spent two hours with quite a few companies, and you’ve done quite a bit of research to this on your own? That’s why we invited you and actually to help with the workshop. What would you say leading companies, in your opinion, are doing well, with diverse candidates, slates, or maybe even with just setting up, say, diverse interview panels?

Glenn Gutmacher 3:37
Sure, well, I think they have some carrots and sticks, both working as incentives. So you want to make sure that every requisition requires at least two diverse candidates be hiring team interviewed in order to make an offer. So you can’t really proceed unless they’ve done proper consideration of qualified diverse candidates. The other piece, I think, is having some incentives around. Or maybe it’s a disincentive that if you don’t hit your diverse slate numbers, as well as your diverse higher numbers, then executives do not qualify for their full annual bonus.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 4:22
Okay, this All right, this makes me crazy, because we hear I think you and I talked about this before, too. We hear an awful lot about organizations that are saying diversity matters to us, right? People are our most important asset. We’re investing in all of this. But how many organizations have you actually connected with where the senior leaders the C suite even have some level of fiscal accountability to diverse hiring?

Glenn Gutmacher 4:50
Well, we know about two thirds of the members have things like the working mother annual contest, you know, where they’re ranking best diverse companies, they have diverse interview slate built in. It’s I think I would say for most large companies that’s baked in already, which is good. But you’re right, the financial teeth, part of it is still relatively rare. I’m happy to say at my prior employer, we had it and still have it. And I think it is important. When you have those quarterly meetings, usually it’s your CEO and your chief diversity officer sitting down with each of his business unit heads to go over the numbers and why you made it or why you didn’t make it. And that shows that serious.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 5:38
Yeah, I would agree with that. I also think one of the things that was an outcome of some of the conversations we had, were not so much about making sure there was a diverse slate as much as there was also a diverse interview panel.

Glenn Gutmacher 5:51
Yeah, Sorry, I didn’t mention that. So I think that is important as well, right? Because if you only have white males conducting the interviews, then it’s easy for the unconscious bias to creep into that process. And you find that great, otherwise, great diverse candidates are getting knocked out for reasons like culture fit or other euphemisms for things that, frankly, are not pertinent to the skills needed to succeed in the job. So companies that are interviewing particularly those high levels, where it may be difficult to find a diverse peer to be part of that interview panel. Don’t let that stop you if you need to go down the level in the organization to find that diverse represent for the panel fine.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 6:35
Or two levels or three levels?

Glenn Gutmacher 6:37
Yeah

Chris Hoyt, CXR 6:38
Yeah. So good. There was a, there was an HBR research bit that you shared in our workshop. And we’ll we’ll put the link out with the podcast when we post it. But it talked about I think, what factors tend to lead to diversity, recruiting and retention efforts, either succeeding or failing, right, if I’m remembering that right, so do you do you have a would you have a top highlight from that report that you’d want to share sort of one thing one big takeaway, if somebody the abridged version if they weren’t going to read that big, scary HBR report?

Glenn Gutmacher 7:10
Yeah, I think the key is to have your white managers involved just interacting more with diverse candidates and diverse employees. It’s simply the exposure time that helps them see past those initial biases. So whether it’s sending them on college recruiting trips to the HBCUs in the HSI schools, or it’s being part of executive mentoring programs, where they’re purposely assigned to diverse mentees, that kind of exposure is going to be great for them.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 7:45
Yeah. And I’m really curious. And as you know, and again, I’ve spent some time with you the last couple of weeks, where he talked a little bit about this, one of the biggest impacts to diversity from during the pandemic was the impact that the pandemic had on college recruiting, and the inability for people to just go stand in, you know, stadiums at their their top pick schools, right, they’re super schools. And the result was, you know, they had to broaden the scope of the schools, the organizations that they went to, and the result coming back from that was a much more diverse internship, right, a much more internship buddy that came in, in your opinion, do you see the pandemic sort of, and as we start to come out of it, any shift there? So the same way, from a diversity recruiting standpoint? I mean, we’re we’re already focusing on historic colleges, we’re already focusing on these particular resource groups. Do you do you do have you seen anything from from a pandemic standpoint, that’s also going to shift in that direction?

Glenn Gutmacher 8:45
Well, I’m sure that the kinds of webinar Invitational events that we’ve started to see will continue right, they’re frankly very cost effective. If they’re done well, you probably can reach even more students than you would physically going to a campus in some cases. The other virtual piece I would hope that companies take more advantage of are these things like coding contests where you can offer an incentive to students and marketed as something that is geared to reaching a diverse talent pool, and then you’re not necessarily even limited to the HBCUs and the HSI schools, you could be putting that out in a viral way to every campus because I think some people don’t even realize, you know, there are actually more black computer science majors at the University of Michigan than the eight HBCUs. So why would you want to limit yourself just to a certain subset of schools?

Chris Hoyt, CXR 9:41
Yeah, we’ve got to think differently, Glenn, I want to thank you for your time. If somebody wants to reach out to you, they want to find you, where do they go to look for you.

Glenn Gutmacher 9:49
If they can’t find my unique name on LinkedIn, that’s pretty sad.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 9:57
They’re not the sourcers Glenn.

Glenn Gutmacher 10:00
All right, so if you don’t Google my name that I guess the next best thing would be to go to my website, which is recruiting-online.com. That’s recruiting dash online.com

Chris Hoyt, CXR 10:10
Awesome, thanks Glenn. Look here sports fans next week. I hope you’ll join us when we connect with Eve Lewis, who is the global inclusive recruiting director at Uber she’s gonna actually talk to us about Uber is using the Mansfield rule to guide diversity recruiting and retention efforts. So data driving decisions around equity and hiring, you can just shut up and take all my attention. So also don’t forget to subscribe to the videocast anywhere you listen to your other favorites. And to do that we’ve made it really simple by sharing those easy subscribe buttons as well as a vast library of previous episodes at CXR.works/podcasts. So until then, we’ll see you in the always active talent community forums over at CXR.works. Thanks everybody.

Announcer 10:51
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