5 Ways You Can Help Your Company Find (and Hire!) More Diverse Candidates

The hiring pipeline is an easy scapegoat for why a workforce lacks diversity. You’ve probably heard the excuses. Maybe you’ve even made some of them yourself. I know I have.

• “I’d love to hire more women, but when I post a job, they don’t apply. They’re not interested.”
• “We don’t get many people of color applying for jobs.”
• “We’d hire them if we could find them.”
• “We post a job and only men apply.”
• “There just aren’t enough qualified women to do the job.”

The list goes on.

People who are members of underrepresented groups are often bewildered. Many eager and qualified candidates, working hard to get hired, are passed over. They feel unnoticed. Invisible even.

At the Stanford VMware Women’s Leadership Lab, researchers frequently hear comments like those in the list above. Each time, they’re reminded of the art of fishing: If you don’t catch a fish, you don’t blame the fish. You change your technique.

While the pipeline might be an easy excuse for why it’s hard to hire people from underrepresented groups, I hope you’re willing to think differently. Try to work to actively expand your pipeline and diversify your candidate pools. I’ll share some techniques you can use—whether you’re a leader, a hiring manager, or an individual contributor. Experienced applicants from marginalized groups are out there, and attracting them to your company is not the impossible task that pipeline-blamers think it is.