Oat lattes and principles

You’ve probably heard that many blue-chip companies are changing some of their internal recruitment practices.

Diverse workforces are more resilient and perform better against every conceivable metric

Someone must have told the Powers That Be that having a lot of female and brown faces in your recruitment videos, marketing collateral and posters around the office but none in the actual office gets noticed. That if you have a new candidate meeting nothing but one demographic… they will notice.

And they will care.

And that last part is the critical part.

I remember interviewing for a job a few years ago.

I had 19 interviews, which is not unusual for senior jobs. And I got offered the job. But I didn’t take it. And there were two reasons for that.

The reason I gave them (which was true) was that I had another offer with better money on the table. They actually tried to go away and wrangle more for my package, but I gave them a vague mumbling “Oh no, it’s OK” answer and didn’t ever tell them the second reason why I went with the other team, which was equally true: in 19 interviews, I had only met white men. Lovely, interesting, amazingly capable white men. I really liked the team. But seriously. Not one brown face. Not one woman. Come on now. This is London in the 2000s. You have to do better than that.

I thought about it. And it drove my decision.

But I am not proud to admit that I didn’t tell them.

How many of us thought similar thoughts at the time of being recruited for our various jobs but either quietly made different choices or just went with it because this is the way of the world?

For my generation, I think the answer is most of us, if not all of us.

But that is changing.

I read recently in a Harvard Business Review piece that approximately 67% of young job seekers will look at workforce diversity when evaluating an offer and over 60% will focus on gender diversity of the leadership team when evaluating an offer. That is all job seekers, you understand. Not just the ones who belong to the under-represented demographic.

The kids are alright.

Because I think I speak on behalf of many of us of the… let’s call it older guard… that we didn’t know we were allowed to assess our employers like that. Or maybe at all. The deferential dynamic of selection only flowing one way, for my generation, mostly broke down with seniority, but the thing is you are always choosing. When it’s your first job… you are still choosing. And the younger generations coming into the workforce seem to know that.

And also, unlike my act of quiet resistance, they are not silent. They feed back on why they turn jobs down.

So. What does our industry do?

Almost every bank and major player in the space (tech, consulting firms and so on) has issued directives that make it obligatory for hiring panels to include at least one woman and, depending on the organisation, one ‘other’ (no, I don’t know what they mean by that either) or one BAME individual or, if you choose to go crazy, two. Although as a friend was recently told by their employers, “One is enough, this is not America.” So that’s us told.

The result?

Immense backlogs for interviews and hires because even though the expectation isn’t for complete panels of brown women right, left and centre… there are still not enough women, BAME individuals or ‘other’, whatever that is, to satisfy demand. And I know you are thinking that this is a red flag in terms of the actual lived diversity of the workforce, but you know that this isn’t the lesson that we took away as an industry. If there is only one woman in a particular geography that can do technical interviews for SRE hires, then all she does now is interviews, and hiring slows down to the pace she can keep churning those out.

And all that because the youngsters care to see who their future colleagues will be. Because they notice.

So let’s stay with this a moment: some of the largest banks in the world have passed a policy that makes it mandatory that all hiring panels include at least one woman exactly because they know that candidates notice if all their interviewees look the same. We all do. Funnily enough, a friend showed me their company video with great pride a few days ago… and all I noticed is that all bar one of the people featured were white. That’s literally all I remember from the video. Whatever else it had going for it, I don’t recall it.

So the point is not invalid. People notice. And it matters.

But they notice because it matters, it doesn’t matter because they notice.

And they are bound to notice what the real make up of your workforce is when they join you.

If you are just going through the motions to showcase diversity where candidates can see it so that you can hire the best of their generation, in the same spirit that you would stock oat milk in the pantry and add smashed avocado on toast to the cafeteria staples because ‘that’s what the kids like these days’, then you may get found out if they walk into your building and find that the oat lattes were just for the outreach days and the diverse employees are nowhere to be seen because they are being paraded in front of another group of hopeful job applicants.

I don’t believe I have to actually say again that diversity is good for business. Every time I have to make the case or hear someone else making the case for diversity I feel a bittersweet blend of vindication and sheer exhaustion: the numbers are on our side. They have been for decades. Diverse workforces (and I mean diverse in every conceivable way) are more resilient and perform better against every conceivable metric. And yet we are still having the conversation. Only the conversation seems to be moving in the wrong direction. We still have to somehow prove we won’t break the shop if you let us in.

And if you ask me if I consider putting a diverse panel in front of candidates a good start, I do. The youngsters care and you want to hire the best of their generation, so you listen. And you realise this is a consideration for attracting young talent. So you respond. That is good. That is a start.

Realising that in order to showcase your diversity, however, you create a backlog because you don’t have enough of the thing you are showing off for… and letting that backlog be an operational problem you carry and not one you solve through hiring, when the whole charade is in the name of hiring… well, this is the height of hypocrisy and make no mistake.

But maybe it doesn’t matter as much as I feel it does.

Since the candidates notice because it matters, they will notice in the interview as they will notice in the hallways when they join you. And looking at the numbers, the realisation finally must be that it isn’t just the women and the brown faces that will notice. Everyone cares. Everyone will notice. And they will notice that you tricked them.

And I guess we already knew the default reaction of the industry to inclusion is cynicism and this smacks of it. The implication of these kinds of policies is that those kids, they care in numbers large enough that we have to tick this box. We may not care (and the proof of that is we parade the women we do have across all hiring panels but don’t face into the irony of just how few of them there are for the thing we are trying to demonstrate to be… true). But they care enough to not even come through the door if we are not seen to be doing this, is the implication. So let’s be seen to be doing this even if we are not actually doing it. So we don’t solve the problem. But maybe that’s OK. Maybe we won’t solve this problem. But they will.

Thankfully for us all, a majority of the candidates care. And maybe your only reason for acting is how deeply they care and for as long as they continue caring… maybe that’s enough. Because there are more of them with every passing year and they will soon outnumber us in the workforce and the cynical workarounds will stop one way or another.

Until then, I have one thing and one thing only to say to these… snowflakes… this new generation with their comfy jeans and their oat lattes and their principles… on behalf of the other half of the old guard: thank you.

#LedaWrites

Leda Glyptis is FinTech Futures’ resident thought provocateur – she leads, writes on, lives and breathes transformation and digital disruption.

She is a recovering banker, lapsed academic and long-term resident of the banking ecosystem. 

Leda is also a published author – her first book, Bankers Like Us: Dispatches from an Industry in Transition, is available to order here.

All opinions are her own. You can’t have them – but you are welcome to debate and comment!

Follow Leda on X @LedaGlyptis and LinkedIn.