Hiring Bias with Brooks E. Scott

He's also the founder and CEO of emerging path coaching , where he's coached hundreds of managers and trained thousands of employees on managing unconscious bias , feedback , how to give and receive values , discovery and alignment , and conversations of race and allyship in the workplace .

He coaches by drawing from all of his experience of life as a former vice president of safety operations for a cyber security company , the manager of operations for the protection team for the CEO and COO of Facebook , a former New Jersey state trooper , and from being a former fifth grade school teacher . Brooks , welcome .

So I live in Oakland , california , but I have a place back in New Jersey so too , and so every two weeks I actually jump between the two coasts .

I do a lot of the in-person facilitation is really starting to expand across companies now , and so the remote environment , which is what I mostly worked in when I started my company , has now gone very much in person , and so I kind of jump around different places and teach and train , and I love combining the leadership development with the diversity , equity and

inclusion , and so the companies that hire me just for diversity work , I slip in a little bit of leadership and development when you're not looking , and the companies that hire me just for leadership and development , I slip in the DEI when you're not looking , because I feel like we can't really be great leaders nowadays without learning how to be great communicators

and learning how to apply a lens of diversity and inclusion .

So for some people , they don't understand what conscious inclusion means . So what would you say are the key components of an inclusive hiring process ?

And so the conscious part about the conscious inclusion and hiring practices is really helping people first understand that these assumptions that we're making are influencing the way that we're showing up in interviews , from the way we're writing job descriptions to the types of questions , changing depending on what the person looks like , who's in front of us , or something

that we connect with them . On this idea that we've rested on the assumption that we've always hired the best candidate for the job and I really , in this course , challenge people to define what that means , because that can change depending on how we're viewing people .

So I think that the good components of that are from the job description questions that we're asking , the promotional process , the interview process , everything from start to finish , on building more inclusive interview process and hiring process .

How can TA teams ensure bias is minimized when they're going about the recruitment process ?

And if we don't have inclusive teams , these teams will be building these tools in their own image , with their own biases , and we see this show up from algorithms , internet search results , and it's also going to be built into .

Whatever one's talking about now is chat , gpt , and so one of the ways that we can start to mitigate this is we have to start double checking ourselves and double checking the people that we're working with , and so this is why I think the communications piece is so important when we're talking about diversity , equity , inclusion , because if I'm seeing something or I

have a question and I don't know how to approach you , or I'm uncomfortable talking to you about it , I'm more likely just going to let it slide , and then we end up building these whole policies and processes that haven't been checked against our own biases .

When you mentioned the AI tools and I have , you know , been keeping up with it , obviously , especially chat , gpt and then there was this huge article that I even posted and made some comments on with higher education and someone asked a tool to you know , tell me what the department heads would look like or what someone in the departments would look like , and

there were no persons of color . All of the women were in like non scientific , non mathematical disciplines and things like that . So the bias was there . Or then we'll see someone asked make my profile picture more professional for their LinkedIn profile . And it changed an Asian person to have more Eurocentric features , like completely changed the way that they look .

So there's things like that .

Now what happens when a recruitment team which isn't very diverse , or a recruitment team that's very homogeneous goes about recruiting and they're told okay , take the bias out , like what's like one way that recruiters can check themselves if they are in a situation where they're not part of an underrepresented or historically excluded group ?

There's so many things we can do and so there's there's no one quick solve to this and it's not something that we're ever going to be , that we're going to be done with , and so we have to build this into into practice , asking ourselves questions , what I say , or ask this question or do , what would I think this thing about this person if they identify

differently than they do in front of me ? One of the quick tips I can share with people I share with people a lot is what are the specific actionable and measurable things that you're using to evaluate this person ?

Because if you say I just didn't feel like they were that confident of leader , or I kind of think they're a little bit , they talked about themselves a little bit too much and , first of all , like you're on interview , so like I hope you're not talking about somebody else , I hope you're talking about yourself .

But comments like that we use in negatively correlated ways to describe certain people from underrepresented groups , and so if I see someone make a comment like that , like , okay , you said that , you said that this person lacked confidence , what are the specific actionable and measurable things that you would say that you would need to see in order for this person to

make you feel like they are confident . And if you can't answer that question , it's probably coming from your bias , and I think it's . It's an interesting example , because we think about people who are in the neuro and a neurodivergent community , and so you know .

I read this somewhere , and it said if you met one person who's autistic , you've met one person who's autistic , and so this shows up differently for people depending on where they are , and so some people who are autistic have extreme difficulty maintaining eye contact in person , and so can you imagine all the people that got cut out of the interview process for

lacking confidence because they couldn't look you in the eye , which has nothing to do with someone who may actually have extreme difficulty for this . And so if I see these phrases that are open to interpretation , I teach people how to start asking questions to pull out what's , what's actually behind those things ?

What is it we're trying to accomplish as a result of building this employee resource group ? And so when you have that mission statement written and you've communicated out to the different departments , they can better understand what they need to do to show up in the space with your group .

And so I would actually start on the other side , making sure that the teams have like , what is the mission for us ? And I think for these TA teams , it's really sitting back and learning how to ask better questions and listen . So what happens ? A lot At a time . This happens particularly with managers that have been managing teams for years .

They think that they have all the answers when it comes to management , or have all the answers when it comes to hiring people , and that's great that they have experience . But there's so much that we can learn by listening and for a lot of these talent teams , if these talent teams don't have people that come from different backgrounds .

It's a very uncomfortable space for someone who's in a majority group to sit in a room with other people who are in the non-majority group , but that's what it's going to take . And so , like , don't just get in because you want to find people from different backgrounds .

Like get in because you're curious to learn and understand the experience at work that some people are having that you would never have from a first-hand experience .

So what's one piece of advice you have for DEI leaders and practitioners who want to show their value at a time like this and say , hey , dei is still a necessity ?

You can do all of those courses through the lens of diversity , equity and inclusion and you can do all those courses through the lens of leadership development .

And so what I'm seeing happen a lot of times in companies it's unfortunate , but this is what's happening it's easy for a company to cut the diversity budget because some companies are doing this work and they actually don't mean it or care about it , and we see when these diversity positions and budgets get cut .

But if you're doing this work through leadership development , leadership development will stand longer for some companies than it will for the AI . I'm not saying that that's how it should be and that that's right , but that's the reality of where a lot of companies are .

And so what I've found to be very successful is to make sure that the AI practitioners and people who are in the space find a way to tie your diversity initiatives to the overall company values , to the overall company mission , to the overall company vision , to leadership development , so that we can show how important and impactful this work is through other ways

other than just diversity .

They care enough to want to build this employee resource group and most of the time companies are not paying them more for this extra work and labor that they're doing , and for a lot of times it can be emotionally intense labor to put these programs together . And so what happens ?

When you have a lot of talented , experienced , intelligent , passionate professionals , people want to want to want to do everything that's possible and that's great , but one of the things that burns out a lot of people in those positions and burns out the groups is trying to do too much all at one time , and especially if a company has never had this group before .

One of the things I do in my advisory work is , like , what are the one or two initiatives that you want to accomplish with this employee resource group ? For it could be this year , it could be this six months , it could be this quarter .

Like , pick one or two things and knock those one or two things out the park , and it's a when people do too much , it's coming from a great place , but if you only have so many people who also have a day job and who also have to deal with their managers , who haven't been trained and who also have to deal with their home life , and if you try to do 18

different projects over the course of four months , you're going to burn out , and if it's not successful , it's gonna give reason to people who don't believe in ERGs , for like , why are we even doing this ? And so it's a difficult piece of advice for some people to hear , because we want to take it all on , but it's more effective .

It'll be a longer term solution and approve the value and the importance if you just pick one or two things to focus on in the beginning .

My name is Brooks E Scott , I'm on Instagram , brooks E Scott , I'm also on TikTok and I'm also the host of a podcast called the Merging Path podcast , and this podcast is created to help us have all the conversations that we continue to avoid in our personal lives and our professional lives , and so you can hit me up on any of those .

I do a lot of heavy stuff on LinkedIn as well , which is which is always always fun , and so , yeah , feel free to reach out if you have any any questions .