Diversity on the Shortlist

Ngā mihi, Ko David Hammond ahau

Question? Can you or should you demand diversity on your shortlist, whether that's for executives or for boards?

You know, my dad had a saying: if you keep doing tomorrow what you're doing today, why do you expect a different result? One of my observations is that during this period of COVID, it's been incredibly challenging for senior executive teams and also for boards. I think boards and teams have to have the best mix of people for performance that they can get.

So where does business diversity come into that? There was a really good report done by McKinsey back in 2019. They compared companies that had both gender and ethnic diversity against companies that didn’t, in terms of profitability.

What they found is that if you have gender diversity on your board, you could be 25% more profitable than companies that don’t. For ethnic diversity, it went up to 36%. I mean, that is huge - that is a real impact. And now we have measurements to actually show the real impact of diversity on performance.

So, can you demand diversity on a shortlist? My answer is yes, absolutely, and you should. I believe it's the responsibility of a recruitment company to do exactly that.

At Tribe, you might be interested to know that we actually set ourselves goals to bring forward candidates on shortlists who have the skills we need but also represent gender diversity, ethnic diversity, and particularly biculturalism. We see it as part of our role so that we can guarantee to you, as a client, that we will do that for you.