The job is the job. But diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging must be ingrained throughout the hiring process.
By D’Najah Thomas
It has been said that one does not get a second chance to make a first impression. This holds true for situations ranging from blind dates to job interviews. For the latter, particularly in the competitive fields of campus housing and residence life, that desire to make a strong and positive first impression works both ways. Housing department leaders and hiring managers repeatedly stress the importance of employers creating an authentic experience for candidates during the recruitment, interview, and hiring process if they intend to attract top talent and ultimately make successful placements. These days, forging that impression goes beyond the more basic considerations like salary or live-in staff amenities. Candidates are increasingly paying attention to how an employer demonstrates their commitment to treating job seekers with fairness, respect, professionalism, and equity.
As candidates consider their job offers, they do so expecting to experience belonging, psychological safety, work/life harmony, skilled supervision and management, and professional development with clear pathways to advancement in their work. Diversity, equity, and inclusion – now commonly shortened to DEI – provide the basis for these priorities and are expected to be explicitly demonstrated throughout the job candidate experience. Campuses are auditing their DEI brand, diversifying the people involved in the screening and interview process, training and equipping committees on ethical and inclusive practices, and taking other steps to improve their efforts.
Karess Gillespie, assistant director of student living at Syracuse University and the current chair of The Placement Exchange, calls the ideal situation “the vibranium rule,” named after the make-believe metal of the Marvel Universe with the extraordinary ability to absorb and store large amounts of energy before releasing it. Similarly, an authentically diverse, equitable, inclusive, and accessible process offers a framework for recruiting, assessing, hiring, and onboarding candidates that can take in, absorb, and manage their unique and complex identities so that candidates can see themselves as partners with their future employer and can craft a way forward that affirms the congruence of institutional and divisional values with their own. The process is especially valuable because it goes beyond checklists and basic actions.
Mike Simmons, director of human resources and DEI for the University of Washington housing and food services department, embraces this approach. After more than 30 years of experience in human resources and diversity work with Boeing and the Seattle Public School system, Simmons has been in his campus role for less than a year. During that time, he has brought the lessons he has learned to the higher education environment which, while unique, shares similarities with his previous work. Communication, leadership, a willingness to put in the work, and the flexibility to make changes along the way remain paramount.
The Talking Stick asked Simmons about the lessons he has learned about implementing equity within the hiring process, both inside and outside of higher education.
Before we discuss the importance of DEI in recruiting, hiring, and retention, I would like to ask you personally why DEI is important to you.
Because everyone belongs. Number one. In order for me to approach my life, personally and professionally, believing that everyone belongs has been embedded or ingrained in me and what I do. Every place I’ve been, it’s really about welcoming all-comers.
You just added "belonging” to DEI when discussing its importance to you. Why do you connect belonging to DEI?
DEI is the way in which society has chosen to articulate that everyone has a seat at the table. The belonging part is really the byproduct. We all want to belong to something. I belong to this team or this family. Belonging means that I feel an innate emotional connection. So belonging is more than cultural and is often external to the work. Our work takes place in cultural environments, and if everyone doesn’t feel like they belong, then productivity gets stunted. It’s important. So I use the acronym DEIB.
You bring experience from a variety of industries, both public and private, business and education. How do you envision that knowledge and experience shaping the work you will do at the University of Washington?
I come in as a small fish in this huge pond: the University of Washington. It’s massive here. At the same time, human resources is human resources, and human resources is people. Where there are people is where I am going to flock to. I have started to envision how I bring a unique perspective from outside the university and meld it with what’s happening. There’s a five-year blueprint, and it’s really, really solid. I ask myself what’s my role and, more importantly, what is housing and food services’ role in this blueprint? HR is what I’m accountable for, so we are considering how we can impact, in a positive way, the culture and climate here in housing and food services.
From our executive director down to our newly hired custodial team members, I have to ask, “Does everyone understand what it means to support DEIB and what their role is to support the mission of the university?” It’s not a gap per se, but it is our task to ensure that everyone brings their full story and self to the role. How do we create an environment where people can share and live their stories without being punched in the nose because they might say something wrong? And that is the big piece. You might say something wrong or something that is perceived to be wrong. How do I, or how do we, help you? How do we have one-on-one diversity lessons to help everyone grow?
So, how do I bring my unique perspective to this role? This is public, as was my time with the school board and Seattle Public Schools, yet at the end of the day they’re all centered around education and maximizing the experience and potential of every student. We are responsible for how we indirectly impact and influence that. Ultimately, I’m here to effect some change, ask tough questions, impart some wisdom, and have people reach within to grow openly without shutting down.
What has your campus and division implemented to make DEI a part of your search and interview committee composition and training?
Having DEIB become a general part of our fabric is a personal goal of mine, and I think it is an unspoken goal across the board for the university, and that is critical.
In housing and food services we have a DEI committee led by Pam Schreiber, our executive director, that offers certain services. The symbolism of the executive director’s role is significant. It shows that she has absolutely bought in to this and has for some time. She hasn’t passed the committee off to someone else. Formally, the committee consults on interview processes and projects, answering questions and offering information and resources. The advice, counsel, guidance, and perspective offered is priceless to the entire housing and food services team.
From an HR perspective, our goal is to ensure that the process from posting to onboarding is a fair and equitable one. The questions are written to elicit information, allowing the candidate to share their experiences while we are testing their awareness and perspective around DEIB and ensuring that this is fair and equitable. We also have a DEI statement, which means there’s no question about where we stand: “Centered on belonging.” If you’re a candidate for hire, you don’t have to guess about where we stand on DEI in housing and food services.
We also have unit priorities. Within those, each unit has priorities directly or indirectly related to DEIB. So we ask unit leaders in their search and interview process to be clear on how they and their employees move the needle on DEIB. We’re getting better at sharing what we’re all doing. But we need to tell our stories more. So often, people don’t think we’ve done things or are moving forward because we haven’t told our story as well as we can.
You just mentioned the importance of getting better at telling your story. At TPE, we call that your DEIB brand. What would you say is the University of Washington’s brand or story when it comes to DEI? What about your division? What stands out to applicants?
A brand is oftentimes in the eye of the beholder. It’s one thing to talk it. It’s another to own it and invest in it. Here again, for me, it’s the tone at the top. When the university president, Ana Mari Cauce, gave her 2023 address, she talked about belonging in her speech. Referencing it from the top gives it strength and power. Our brand starts there, with her. When you talk about investment and people, I look at Rickey Hall, our vice president and university diversity officer. His work on campus is well known, including the blueprint, and it has established a baseline reference to the work that gets done at the highest levels of the university. That brand is clear.
As Cauce says, “We must continue the work of building a culture in which everyone is welcome as their authentic self.” Our division then must tell the story with alignment. Her speech was huge, but I’m always looking for the piece I can pull out and use. That’s branding in and of itself. That’s DEI without saying DEI. That’s powerful. It’s what continues shaping what the university can be, and that isn’t possible without a commitment to DEI.
In the university’s Continuum College 2023 impact report, there's a section on fostering diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. In that section, there’s a belonging index, and I’m thinking, “I’ll be damned.” It’s there. I don’t need to invent anything new. I just need to look at our brand at the top level and the tools, resources, and processes that indicate an alignment across the campus. Now, I need to understand it to use it, but the point is, it’s there.
What steps has your team taken to integrate DEI into your recruiting, interviewing, and onboarding processes?
How the job posting is written is number one. How it is written will either be inclusive or exclusive. There’s no in-between. Yes, the job is the job, but how it is written is where we have to be careful. The choice of words – “required” versus “preferred” or “desired” – is powerful because the words used will dictate if they decide to apply or not. We are also asking ourselves, “Do we know what we look like today, in terms of talent and who’s in what jobs, and do we know what the availability index for those jobs in this region is?” It’s a practice of intentionally looking at the candidate pool and applicant numbers that is used at Boeing. I believe we will incorporate more of it here to inform our hiring.
Moreover, ensuring that participants on interview teams are aware of bias and have been trained on impartiality and the need for consistency with questioning requires that we continue to assess and are willing to stop production, so to speak, to pivot and address matters when they arise. Integrating DEI is a process that is not broken, but like everything else, we can always get better. But the university itself is dead set, with zero tolerance, on making sure that all of our hiring practices are inclusive in that anyone can apply and no one is being hired outside of the university application process.
What have you found to be the factors that influence your candidates accepting your offer over those of other employers? Is there any correlation to DEI?
I don’t know that we have data, but I can tell you that today’s candidates, especially the generation graduating from college, make decisions differently. Their decisions are made on answers to questions like this: “What’s your social impact?” “What are you doing for the communities in which you exist?” “Where do you stand on certain issues?” When it comes to the jobs themselves, they ask, “What environment am I going to be working in?” “Can I progress, learn, and grow?” All those things come into play. It’s a buyers’ market, and candidates have choices. It comes down to the impact of emotion and identity and work/life blend because we think about home at work and work at home, and it’s gotta blend.
Is it one factor per se that is drawing candidates? I don’t think so. Do we have a culture to help a person fully realize their potential, and I mean beyond their first job? I think so. It’s what we’ve talked about: the way in which DEIB is woven into our fabric that is allowing our candidates to see themselves belonging.
It is a buyers’ market, and with the university having such a high value and capacity for DEI there has to be a rigorous set of candidate expectations. You mentioned previously that as a part of your interview process, you ask candidates, "What is your definition of diversity?" You then encourage them to take their time while you sit silently until they answer the question. How does that go over in the interview? What have you learned?
The ability to be quiet and listen – you’d be surprised at what you hear. So much of it is great stuff. You learn a lot. It’s not a trick question, but I can guarantee that many candidates haven’t thought about it or been prepared to answer it. One hundred percent of the time, I’ve learned something.
I can also guarantee that when they get hired, the first thing I’m going to do is follow up because it’s a clear line of sight for me into how that person will approach their team and, in many cases, how they are going to fare. I think you have to test for certain things. You have to test for managers to have the right tools, and if they don’t we help them be prepared. Interviews are informative, and they minimize the risk in hiring so that, somewhere down the line, we don’t say, “How come someone didn’t catch that?” There will always be something. But we are obligated to be as aware as we can be.
At this point, it might go without saying, but from your perspective, who is responsible for DEI?
Everyone has a stake in it and an accountability to it. We have an innate obligation to it. You cannot execute on goals and deliverables without ensuring that all are welcome. When I interviewed – it was an all-day affair – part of the process was to offer a presentation to anyone who called in. In my presentation, I had a chart that said, “Everyone has to be a chief diversity officer.” Since I have been hired, people keep bringing it up when they see me on campus. They understand they have to do it, but they don’t all understand how that can happen. So we create forums, learning opportunities, and the space for people to become equipped to dive into this way of being. Securing the will of an organization is what comes to mind here. This is what President Cauce has done for the university. This is what Pam Schreiber is doing for housing and food services, and I am on board to do my part.
Someone might read this article and think, "We need to do something more on my campus." What advice would you give a colleague looking to incorporate DEI into the recruiting, hiring, and retention efforts?
Thomas L. Friedman, author of The World is Flat, is quoted as saying, “Always be in beta.” It is the notion of never becoming stagnant, constantly listening and learning because this work is never finished. Like makers of software, consider nothing finished. Always be working on a better version of your products and yourself. That doesn’t apply just to our students. We, too, are learners, students, and change agents, and as such, your approach must be rooted in the disposition that you will never arrive but must commit to constantly working at it.
Where do you see opportunities for growth when it comes to DEI and retention of a diverse workforce?
Oftentimes, it begins and ends with hiring the one DEIB person and giving them no resources. Yet we know DEIB is a $5 billion industry. There’s plenty of everything and lots of theoretical sharing. How do we go from DEIB impacting culture and climate to DEIB being why a university exists? In Europe, they say, “Mind the gap.” The gap to mind here is how we move from theory to application, creating a culture of a constant, revolving door of learning to the point that you don’t have to say DEI is what we’re working on today, but we’re working on it by doing the right things because it’s our fabric, our identity. It’s all about theory to action.
With opportunity come challenges, and anti-DEI legislation is presenting many challenges for campuses. When I talk to employers, it is your campus’s approach that allows me to speak about moving forward with hope and possibility even if a campus cannot have a designated person or office supporting DEI. What would you say to someone on a campus without a dedicated DEI office?
Joyce Tucker was vice president for diversity at Boeing during my time there, and we were at a diversity conference one of those years. I’ll never forget her saying at one of those conferences, with the Boeing chairman and CEO present, “My job is to work myself out of a job so that you don’t need this office anymore.” That’s the greatest example. It just needs to be in our fabric and ingrained in our culture. Is Boeing there yet? Absolutely not. Though to say that in a room of maybe 800 people is powerful, it also makes you walk away asking yourself, “What’s my role in making her job go away?”
D’Najah Thomas is the director of The Placement Exchange. Learn more about upcoming events and resources at theplacementexchange.org.
