How to Diversify Your Workforce for our Modern Times

Here's my #BlackinSTEM story. (It speaks to how essential it is for nonprofits to diversify now, in order to grow and excel today and well in the future.)  

I've loved aviation since my first plane ride. But after graduating with a Bachelor’s of Aviation Management, I realized I couldn't pay back my student loans based on pilots' starting salaries at the time. (I could have made more bartending!)  

I eventually learned about all the cool things the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency was involved in around the world, including the Aviation and GPS efforts. I ended up working there for 15+ years. During this time period, I obtained a Master’s of Aeronautical Science and a Master’s of International Relations.

Throughout my career, I realized I was good at listening to scientists, then translating that jargon into more common terminology to explain our work to laypeople and diverse groups of stakeholders.

For example, we had a program that determined the position of satellites using software. I explained it by comparing the satellites to Jersey Shore characters.  

"Snookie must be drunk - she's falling off the radar!"  

People listened differently. Instead of halfway paying attention, they laughed, leaned in, and asked better questions. Over time, we built more dynamic and high performing internal teams because the communication just worked.  

That's what can happen when talented folks from racially diverse backgrounds aren't forced to change or codeswitch for these positions.  

Today, so many organizations KNOW they need to meaningfully diversify their talent pools long term for all the reasons I just mentioned, but most don’t know how to do this in ways that will lead to the outcomes they desire while also caring for those in their talent pool.

Here are some steps you can take to help diversify your workforce. 

Recognize Your Recruiting Rut

Take a look at how you’re recruiting new talent. When you go to college job fairs, are you only tapping into your current leadership team’s alma maters? If that’s the case, you’ll only get status-quo results. Selecting schools and spaces to recruit diverse leaders requires new thought, research, and relationship-building.

Review the entry point for most candidates: the job posting. What do yours say about your organization and its culture? You’ve got to convey information (and perhaps even do a little coaching with your team) so BIPOC people apply for positions that historically haven’t been available or open to them.

Be candid with yourself and your team about your hiring processes. HR professionals are taught to be unbiased. But unconscious bias affects us all. You may not see a problem in your recruitment efforts because you do not have the lived experience of being underrepresented and underrecognized.

Revamp Your Promotion Process to Retain Talent 

I once worked with a government organization that noticed their Black staff were not getting promoted at the same rate as white staff. So, they looked into the story behind the data. 

They discovered Black professionals weren’t given an equivalent number of visible opportunities to shine (developmental opportunities and assignments, leadership roles, and networking/mentoring opportunities, just to name a few) as their counterparts. 

So, this paired with other factors led to the evaluation of many processes, most notably, the promotion practices. They noted distinct patterns in Black promotion rates compared to white counterparts. This, paired with the notably lower rates of Black professionals even being recommended for promotion, identified the need for continuous evaluation of practices and processes. 

Striving to make the process more equitable, they had to take a hard look at existing practices and make adjustments to make it fair and equitable. I’m not saying major progress was made, but it’s an example of taking on the challenge of making a process fair and equitable to better the workforce for the future.  

Like within any organization, too much subjectivity in your hiring process likely means some people aren’t getting a fair shake. Because a hiring manager can always justify who they’re promoting, even if it's based on their personal preference over true qualifications.

Does your promotion process truly include a fair, data-driven evaluation of individuals’ merit? 

If not, you’re likely not getting an ROI on your recruitment efforts. Because you won’t retain talent (especially BIPOC talent) over time.   

Evaluate Outdated Policies 

I was working in the aviation sector when Colorado legalized marijuana back in 2012. There was a huge Airforce presence in the state, but even decades after the legislation passed, you couldn’t get security clearance if you lit up from time to time. Qualified, experienced talent would apply for roles, but then fail the drug test. We couldn’t hire them because of outdated hiring practices that hadn’t adapted to changing societal norms and needs.

Complex organizations rarely change their historical policies and procedures. There’s a lot of reasons for that: security risk, safety protocols, hierarchical cultures where you don’t question higher-ups, reluctance to change …

After all, if you’ve been doing it for 20 years and it “worked,” why not keep doing it for the next 20 years? Well, because your organization won’t work as well as it could in today’s changing times.  

Marijuana is one thing. But race is another – way more vital.  In 2024, it’s well past time to grapple with the systemic racial biases that prevent organizations from building diverse, high performing teams.  By 2044, the US is projected to be a "majority minority” nation.  

(A quick note: at Bonsai, we don’t use deficit-based language to describe Black, Indigenous, and people of color. Here, I employ the term “majority minority” only because it’s the one most commonly used to describe this shift in U.S. demographics. Here’s hoping for a change to an asset-based phrase in the future!)

This is the recruitment conversation all HR teams of complex organizations need to be having:  

• Is your organization getting ahead of our new racial demographics in its recruitment and retention practices?

• Are you going to stay behind the culture curve, or get in front of it?

If you work for any kind of complex organization, it’s not enough to say you want diversity.

Instead, it requires going past how you’ve “always done things” to share opportunities in brand new ways to get the outcomes you’re hoping for. So that you can become the organization you want to be.