Do diversity mandates work?
Should your company implement diversity mandates?
Many companies implement some kind of diversity mandate in their hiring process. Most commonly, they require that hiring managers have a diverse final slate of candidates for a job before they make any offers. Yet, we find that these mandates have mixed results. On one hand, research has shown that it is fairly easy to encourage diverse hiring decisions when a diverse slate is represented. On the other, mandates can cause backlash. Whether or not you should institute a diversity mandate will depend on your organization, your goals, and how you work.
Should your company implement diversity mandates?
Many companies implement some kind of diversity mandate in their hiring process. Most commonly, they require that hiring managers have a diverse final slate of candidates for a job before they make any offers. Yet, we find that these mandates have mixed results. On one hand, research has shown that it is fairly easy to encourage diverse hiring decisions when a diverse slate is represented. On the other, mandates can cause backlash. Whether or not you should institute a diversity mandate will depend on your organization, your goals, and how you work.
"The burden of creating a diverse workforce cannot fall exclusively on HR or individual hiring managers. "
In an HBR piece from 2016, researchers reported that candidates in the majority, regardless of race or gender, were nearly always chosen. They asked participants to rank the extent to which they believed each candidate was best for the job. When a slate of two men and one woman was presented to a panel of hiring managers, they were much more likely to recommend a man for the job. Yet, when a slate was two women and one man, they’d recommend a woman. The same was true for race, when presented a candidate slate with two Black candidates and one white candidate, participants were much more likely to indicate that a Black candidate was the best fit for the job. The odds went beyond basic probability. Researchers reported that “the odds of hiring a women were 79.14 times greater if there were at least two women in the finalist pool [...] (and) the odds of hiring a minority were 193.72 times greater if there were at least two minority candidates in the finalist pool.” This effect held true even with larger candidate pools, including six or eight finalists. Mandating a diverse slate has been statistically proven to be a huge help in terms of hiring candidates from different backgrounds. This research has also pointed out the need to have more than a single token diversity candidate.
However, mandates can create backlash. A New York Times article reported that hiring managers at Wells Fargo were interviewing diverse candidates after the job had already been offered to someone else. The mandate to interview at least one diverse candidate was hurting the very people it was intended to help. Mandates also have the potential to build resentment within HR or hiring managers. Finding diverse candidates is hard. It takes more time and resources that HR can’t always spare leading to issues like this, where a candidate is hired before HR even has a chance to find a diverse candidate.
If you’re going to have a mandate, it is important to make sure that everyone in your organization owns diversity. The burden of creating a diverse workforce cannot fall exclusively on HR or individual hiring managers. The organization as a whole needs to be committed to sourcing, researching, interviewing, and advancing diversity. Mandates can certainly be effective. Research has proven that. We recommend a mandate (if you think it would be helpful for your organization) for openings at the most senior levels. These are the roles that are usually open for longer, affording time to curate a thoughtful, diverse candidate slate. Diversity in senior leadership is also critical for solving for diversity in the rest of the organization. For more junior levels, unless you’re trying to solve a dramatic diversity discrepancy in a group (in which case mandating having several diverse candidates is key), we recommend simply having an expectation that hiring managers, HR, and the teams looking to expand do their best to find diverse talent.
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