9 Ways to Retain Diverse Talent

You’ve invested time and resources into making your recruitment processes more inclusive. Now, how do you make sure your diverse hires stick with you in the long run? Here are 9 things you need to do to retain diverse talent.

1. Address unconscious bias

We all believe we are ethical, unbiased decision makers, but studies into unconscious biases—deeply ingrained stereotypes that influence our behavior —prove otherwise.

“More than two decades of research confirm that, in reality, most of us fall woefully short of our inflated self-perception,” writes Harvard University researcher Mahzarin Banaji in Harvard Business Review.

Our unconscious biases influence how we hire, onboard, manage, and promote employees. Here are a few examples of how unconscious bias can play out in the workplace:

Telling a female employee that they’re pushy, bossy, aggressive, or intimidating.

Ignoring a colleague or forgetting to cc them in emails.

Consistently leaving a teammate out of bonding activities.

Making assumptions about a person’s role in the company.

Behaviors like these not only have a significant impact on feelings of inclusiveness, but they also create institutional barriers to growth over time.

Companies that are committed to retaining diverse talent must, therefore, address unconscious biases to ensure that they don’t impact employees.

Business can dismantle racism.
Janet Stovall

2. Be amazing at onboarding diverse employees

An often overlooked part of the recruitment life cycle, onboarding is crucial to employee retention. An employee onboarding survey of over 1000 employed US workers revealed that 31 percent of people left a job within the first six months, with 68 percent of those departing within three months.

If the first few months of a new hire are precarious, they are even more so for minority employees. To help them feel like they’ve made a good decision accepting your job offer, you need to develop an onboarding process.

Onboarding should be more than just the paperwork done on your new hire’s first day. Effective onboarding includes properly introducing the new employee to the rest of the team, helping them navigate their surroundings, and training them on the specific tools and processes they’ll need to do their job.

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