Recognising and addressing unconscious bias in the recruitment process is one of the biggest issues HR and Recruiting professionals face. Dealing with it can be difficult, especially in large organisations, but it certainly not something that is impossible.
My guest on the podcast this week is Jon Hull Group Head of Resourcing at Carillion. Carillion have been running diversity and inclusion initiatives that addresses issues with unconscious bias head on and they have had some seriously impressive results.
In the interview we discuss:
• How neuroscience helped Carillion make sense of their problem
• Why bottom up is better than top down
• Diversity and Inclusion as innovation
• Unconscious bias in recruitment marketing and employer branding
• How HR started to think differently about themselves
Jon also talks through the results Carillion have seen from these initiatives and gives his advice to employers who are looking at how to deal with similar issues.
This week’s podcast is kindly supported by Lever, where ATS meets CRM
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Lever. Providing a modern take on the applicant tracking system. Lever combines ATS and CRM functionality into a single, powerful platform to help you source, nurture, and manage your candidates all in one place. What’s more, Lever’s deceptively simple interface means that hiring managers and applicants love it too. To find out how Lever can help you both accelerate and humanize hiring, visit www.lever.co recruit. That’s www.lever.co recruit. And Lever is spelt L E V E R Lever. Where ATS meets CRM.
Matt Alder [00:01:07]:
Hi, everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 60 of the Recruiting Future podcast. One of the biggest issues faced by HR and recruiting professionals is recognizing and dealing with unconscious bias in the recruitment process. My guest this week is Jon Hull, group head of resourcing at Carillion. Carillion have been running a diversity and inclusion initiative which addresses the issue of unconscious bias head on, and they’ve had some seriously impressive results. Keep listening to find out how they did it. Hi, Jon, and welcome to the podcast.
Jon Hull [00:01:46]:
Hi.
Matt Alder [00:01:47]:
So could you just introduce yourself to everyone and tell us what you do?
Jon Hull [00:01:51]:
Yeah, I’m Jon Hull. I’m head of resourcing group, head of resourcing for Carillion. We’re a large construction business and FM services business. We employ about 45,000 people globally and about 30,000 people in the UK across the whole of the nation. And we recruit about four and a half thousand permanent hires last year.
Matt Alder [00:02:14]:
Cool. And so a couple of weeks ago, you and me had a quite surreal experience, didn’t we? So just to explain to people who are listening, we were both talking at a conference called Recfest and we were, we were talking silent disco style, so the audience had headphones on, we had a mic and we were doing a presentation at the same time. And you know, one of my, one of my biggest, you know, it was a great, it was a great experience. It was a bit weird, but it was really good, really good fun. But, but my biggest disappointment was obviously because I was talking. I didn’t get to hear your presentation. So really, I, you know, I want, I want, I want to sort of hear what you, what you, what you spoke about and kind of share that the audience really. Now I know that your topic was diversity. Talk a little bit about the background about what kind of, you know, what sort of inspired you to talk about that.
Jon Hull [00:03:12]:
Yeah, I mean, the title of the presentation was it’s not about the Target. Stupid, really. Stealing Bill Clinton’s line because diversity, you know, diversity, inclusion has been around in recruitment as long as I’ve been in recruitment, which is 20 years. And when I first went into agency recruitment had a female boss who had just been allowed to wear trouser suits as well as skirts. And then only recently we saw the PwC case of a receptionist being turned away for not wearing high enough heels. And it triggered a question to me as, you know, how far have we really moved the dial and why hasn’t it moved? And then talked about our experiences in Carilion of what we’re doing and what we’ve done to kind of try and counter that and come at the problem from a slightly different angle. So in Carilion, not unlike any major corporate at the moment, there are diversity targets. We have gender targets and aspirations. And I think we want 30% of our leadership roles to be filled by females by 2017. Currently in the two big divisions, that’s sitting at about 13% and about 5% in the other division.
Matt Alder [00:04:27]:
So a long way to go then.
Jon Hull [00:04:29]:
Yeah. And if we can, and it’s improved, it’s improved year on year. So we’ve done some good stuff around networks but if we carry on at the run rate we are, we would be like 20, 40 before we hit that target. So, you know, something had to, has to, had to and has to change the way we do stuff and the way we think really. So about a year ago or so, just after I joined, this was a major topic and I was part of the steering group to look at how we improve that focus really. And it was triggered out of, partly out of this desire to be a good citizen and reach those targets, but partly because we just didn’t know what to do, you know. And it was, the frustration was evident from the non execs, non exec board down to the, you know, the operational board as well. So it wasn’t through want of trying to do the right thing. So we looked at how do we. Well, first we looked at what are the causes of this behavior almost in terms of, you know, people are, well meaning generally most people and they want to do the right thing but actually still get outcomes that are like the status quo. So we did some research into, you know, what could we do to help our management population. And it came very obvious that unconscious bias was the root cause of this in terms of people just don’t know that they’re biased and everyone’s got it. But you just, unless you know what the triggers are or, or you can become aware of it, you can’t change it.
Matt Alder [00:06:12]:
Yeah, I mean that’s a, you know, that’s, that’s, that’s a very big, very big topic at the moment.
Jon Hull [00:06:17]:
What.
Matt Alder [00:06:18]:
Could you just tell us a bit more about the research that you did?
Jon Hull [00:06:20]:
Yeah, so we researched the market. Yeah. Did some reading and then, and then we, you know, we wanted to get some interventions in, so training or, you know, learning about this and about diversity. And it became apparent that a lot of the supplier, the traditional suppliers in this space were very focused on almost like a transactional element and almost preachy, saying you’re all wrong for not being as diverse as you could be. And this is so it’s a very kind of interesting market, but I don’t think that’s moved on since the 1980s almost. So. And we started to look at other organizations and we chose, ultimately we chose a leadership development organization that helps us because their approach was, came at it from two angles, was a neuroscience approach which explains the bias that’s within us and how the brain works to trick you. So it’s not evolved over sort of 20,000 years since we were in the field fighting for survival. And so there’s a kind of scientific element and then a kind of interactive element that was like, well, hang on, you know, let’s, let’s actually look at some real situations in your workplace and how do you, how do you counsel them and how do you call them out and what, you know, what frameworks you need and how do you become aware of what you’re doing or your impact on others. So you know, it’s self awareness, but it was about coming at it from a much more ground up level, saying, look, we’re all biased and we all hold some bias one form or another and you can’t help it. Right. It’s in there. The only way you can start to become master of it is to become aware of it. And then you can, and then there’s some kind of tools and techniques that help you do that. And there was no real, there was no real. This wasn’t primarily focused around recruitment initially. It was, we need to kind of raise this level of awareness. Now of course, what we thought would happen and what did happen was we started to see managers ask in the workshops and in the conversations for help around recruitment and questions about recruitment because understanding that’s probably one of the biggest single points of bias when someone’s entering an organization through recruitment or through promotion. And so, you know, the pull factor came from managers rather than HR being top down and just, you know, there’s a recruitment form and you must fill it in. And we all know that managers, you know, the good old competency based interview, they retrofit the attributes of the candidate to the one they really want. So you know, there’s a nice form, we filled it in but it was always the candidate I thought of first and you know, but I filled in a form for you. So HR is happy because you’ve ticked a box and the line manager’s happy but you haven’t really shifted the dial in any, in any meaningful way. So. And both parties are talking on parallel lines rather than across the lines. So. And I think, you know, I’m aware of that in hr. Some HR departments like to sort of say we’re doing a really good job and isn’t it great? But actually, you know, you’re not because the managers aren’t bought into your process or tools. So. And this was a way of actually managers starting to go, hang on, you know, I really understand now why, why this is important. And we tied it to, we’d launched this program at the leadership conference that year and which is Basically the top 300 leaders across, across the globe, mainly UK. But we tied it to innovation because our business has nothing except people in the business. We know we don’t hold product. It is a service, purely service based business. And so actually in clients of ours always want, they said, well how do you innovate, you know, how do we know you innovate and blah blah, blah. Now one, one of the, one of the triggers for this whole kind of process we went through was top three in our engagement survey that year was about diversity. Inclusion was, was third on the agenda, which really surprised us. But when you probed for the comments, this wasn’t about oh we need more, you know, black people or women or whatever. It it was about if only you listened to different voices and different opinions, you would get a better answer. So therefore actually people from different backgrounds will have or an experience will have some really great input to ideas that will probably play through into client service or new products or whatever. So that really resonated and we didn’t mandate the course either. We said we don’t mandate anything except safety critical training. And we’ve had a massive, we’ve been overbooked because people saw that and the conference, yeah, I kind of get that. I get that innovation is really important to our business and client and ultimately we have to because we’re in such a low margin environment that anything that’s a competitive advantage will play through. So it meant it got a lot of pull and a lot of interest. So, you know, all levels of managers came on the, on the workshops over a period, mixed workshops. And then obviously like I said before the pull started to be, well, how do we get better at this recruitment thing? You know, what can we do? And you know, ultimately we looked at various different divisions and different. But we, you know, the big factor was we looked at the graduate program, the graduate recruitment and it was fairly standard. You know, it was, it was all right, but it wasn’t very robust. And our, you know, we had traditional imagery of men in high vis jackets and you know, looking at trains or bits of road. Not very inspiring. So we, as a result we completely revamped the branding and the imagery and the attraction to actually tell real stories about road, real young graduates who’d work with us across a range of disciplines and mixed gender. But more importantly, we then put in a process that was much more robust which purely measured behaviors and attitudes. I mean lots of businesses do it that were appropriate to. Carilion insisted on training managers on the, on the techniques of, you know, assessment which they, at this point, of course they bought into it. They’re going to know we get it, we want this stuff. And as more and more we’re training, well, we get that, you know, why can’t we do this, you know, more. This is great because actually we’re seeing the kind of, the qualities in individuals that we wouldn’t have ever thought about in a standard interview or in, you know, in the past because we’re not, we weren’t aware of it and the outcomes were really, we didn’t really have in mind, we didn’t know what was going to happen. But this last year we’ve had, I think we recruited about 60 graduates across the main two businesses, construction services. About 33% are women, about 50% ethnic mix. And you know, the industry average for us for female graduates is about 12%. So you know, we’ve really shifted the dial on that by, but by engaging, you know, we did it, we didn’t sort of impose this top down way of doing things. We involved the managers and interestingly we’re starting to get much more pull around the senior, you know, senior hires and training for, you know, all sorts of things, apprentices, engineers even, you know, it’s kind of, it’s starting to really grow legs. So we just thought that it started to kind of trigger questions in managers rather than it being an HR thing and being at the HR police because. And also the domain that actually, you know, I think in some companies, and we suffer from it as well, is hr. Seem to think they are kind of not biased or the guardians of. Right. And of course, we’re probably our own worst enemies as well. So it started to manage. Start to go well, hang on a second, what are you guys doing? And they’re in control as well now, which is a really good place to be. So you see great outcomes, you see much better behaviors from managers, more awareness. And while it’s not the full answer because there’s kind of societal pressure in the world we live in, there are not many female civil engineers. There is a shortage generally, and then there’s only about 16% of the ice is female. So you’re fishing in a difficult pool, but hopefully. And the outcomes from that graduate program, which weren’t designed in, meant that actually we didn’t. We didn’t specify through talking to managers the type of degree someone had or we didn’t. Well, we thought we’d get applications from engineering students and STEM people, but obviously, as it happened, we got a broad range. And when they came to assessment centre, because it was kind of blind, no one knew who they were, we’d done the screening up front. We chose them purely on behaviors. And as a result, you got things like, you know, we had graphic designers that are now working in our construction work, winning business. And people go, well, that would be. That’s really innovative because, you know, this lady will be able to, you know, do presentations much better than we’ve ever done them before. We’ve had, you know, fluent language speakers working on the railways, which never would have recruited before. And actually it goes back to first principles where the managers are like, well, actually, you know, we. It would be ideal if there’s some technical understanding, but you know what, if they’re bright enough, we can probably train them. And actually it’s all about, you know, 90% of what makes you successful in those roles in our business is all about attitude, behavior and the fit to the culture of the organization and not a lot else. So still work in progress, but we’ll tweak that for next, next year. But amazing outcomes and interesting dialogue with the business that people are starting to open their eyes. You know, because I’ve always come in from an angle in my head. There’s no real war for talent. We just don’t really know how to spot it when we find It. And because of these biases, you know, we think we expect the candidate to walk in that looks exactly like me, has got the same experience, same qualifications. And of course that’s a. Never true and actually not desirable. But we fall into that trap because that’s all we know. We haven’t had our eyes opened. So this has helped us kind of A, fill talent gaps, which traditionally we would have struggled, but B, we’ve got a much broader spectrum of background and fit and ideas that hopefully will play through into the future. And that’s sustainable as well.
Matt Alder [00:18:07]:
I mean, it’s a fantastic initiative and I love the way that you’ve taken such a kind of holistic and kind of natural approach to it. A couple of. Just a couple of quick questions before. Before we finish the first one, you sort of mentioned your marketing and pictures of, you know, people in hard hats looking at trains. I’d imagine probably clipboards as well.
Jon Hull [00:18:32]:
Yeah.
Matt Alder [00:18:33]:
And all that kind of stuff. Did the. Did the amount of, you know, almost unconscious marketing bias in what you were doing surprise you? Was it at a greater level than you thought? Or was it. Or was it something that you KN you already have to change?
Jon Hull [00:18:47]:
Well, it didn’t surprise me only because in a previous life, as you know, I worked at a company called RS Components, and we did some. I can’t really. We did some sort of campaign for engineers or something, I can’t remember. And I brought. Or maybe it was graduates, but I brought the imagery home that had been designed the photographs and showed it to my daughter, who was about 12 or 13 at the time. And I said, what do you think of it? You know, you’re in school and what is this? She said, it’s just a bunch of boring old men looking at kit. And I thought, oh, my God, that’s our target audience. And we must be putting off a whole host of, you know, great candidates. You know, she’s thinking that at 13, you know, more sophisticated, sophisticated graduates are probably just not even going to bother to look. So, you know, we really went back to the. So when I joined Carillion 3, four years later, it was high in my mind. And you go. And then you. When you look at it, you go, this is just homogenous. It’s not very creative. It doesn’t tell a story of. I mean, it goes back, you know, I mean, you’re a marketing and advertising guru, Matt, you know, but it doesn’t tell a story, it doesn’t energize you, it doesn’t sort of give you any sense of what’s really going on from a marketing and sales point of view. There was no hook, so it didn’t surprise me, but it sort of shocked me that it was still happening. You know, the lack of imagination, really.
Matt Alder [00:20:11]:
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s something that, it’s something that I see all the time, actually, when I’m, you know, when I’m working with people and kind of auditing industries and looking at what they’re looking at what they’re doing. And I, you know, sometimes people are aware of it and they’ve just not done anything about it. Sometimes they’ve just not thought about it because they’ve been focusing on the, on the process. Final, final question. What would your, what would your advice be to someone in another organization who is, who is facing the same challenges and wanting to kind of put the same initiatives in?
Jon Hull [00:20:42]:
Well, I think firstly it’s approaching it from the manager’s perspective. So get in their shoes because I think we, well, in any sort of discipline, we always think the other is they’re wrong or they just don’t know. They’re not experts and we’re the experts. But when you get inside the head of a manager, they want to do the right thing generally. And they’re generally in that position because they’ve got some capability and an ambition. And when you go and talk to them, generally they get it and they just want to know the how or, you know, a way of navigating around it. And that’s where your expertise comes in as a recruiter or an HR or whatever it is you are, because you can then bring the tools to them. But when you’ve got those champions, it’s far easier to get those ideas in. And the proof, you know, for us this was, wasn’t, you know, in Carillion, as most companies, everything’s measured. It’s all about return on investment and it’s about, you know, then delivering from a recruitment perspective, delivering good people, you know, at the right time. And this, you know, ultimately it came down to that, you know, you want 60 graduates this year, we’re going to find them. But, you know, we’re, we’re competing against all sorts of other organizations and you know, we need to think differently. You know, and that was a sort of, that was the branding of the, of the workshops was think different because stealing the old Apple advert. But, you know, but it wasn’t about thinking, you know, it wasn’t just about diversity, was, you know, you have to think differently to get a different outcome. You know, not, you know, it’s not just about ticking a box. And if you do think differently, you will. You will get a different outcome.
Matt Alder [00:22:25]:
Jon, thank you very much for talking to me.
Jon Hull [00:22:26]:
Thank you, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:22:28]:
My thanks to Jon Hull. You can subscribe to this podcast on itunes or via your podcasting app of choice. Just search for recruiting future. You can also find past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com. on that site, you can subscribe to the podcast mailing list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
