How to Prioritize Diversity in Hiring, According to Greenhouse

As a first-generation college graduate, Gary Davis had always been active in the diversity, equity and inclusion space. When he was an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan, he was involved in the Black Student Union where he served as its vice president, and worked closely with non-profits centered around access and equity.

Later when he joined the workforce, his interest in the DE&I space grew. Davis wanted to transfer the knowledge he acquired at university to businesses, and help them become more intentional with diversity.

After spending much of his career working in the non-profit space, Davis eventually landed a role at Greenhouse, one of the fastest-growing talent acquisition software companies in the world, where he now serves as a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Advisory Director.

In his current role, Davis focuses on advisory services for clients interested in improving diversity and inclusion at the company. On a day-to-day basis, Davis often looks through Greenhouse’s software to make recommendations and provide real-time coaching and feedback in terms of best practices.

“Because we’re a recruiting software company, our customers care a lot about what is actually going on in their pipeline,” Davis told The Org. “They want to be able to see if we can take information – like a person’s race or their gender – anonymize that information, strip it directly from their profile and aggregate it.”

From finding out this information, Davis helps his clients identify the diversity top funnel, the demographics that are applying to their jobs and the source of each of the candidates.

Davis believes that one of the most exciting parts of his job is to guide his clients to see beyond their existing recruiting platforms to attract a more diverse and talented workforce.

Meeting people where they’re at

For people who want to move into the diversity equity and inclusion space, Davis recommends that they fully understand what the work entails.

“There’s a lot of people including DE&I in their headlines [on Linkedin],” he said. “But what I will tell folks is you have to be self-aware and you have to know what brings you to this work and understand how you might be uniquely qualified based on your background — whether that is something you studied or something you’ve experienced in real time.”

Davis also stresses the importance of meeting people where they are at, especially when you’re working with external clients.

“I don’t like giving recommendations that don’t match where they are,” Davis said. “ I think for a lot of people, they talk a lot about what they should say to diversify organizations – such as making sure people have equal pay and equal advancement pathways, but I don’t think they necessarily talk about how to do that.”

Diversity initiatives at Greenhouse

At Greenhouse, Davis currently leads a Black employee resource group (ERG), in which he organizes regular events, one of the most recent ones being a cooking class. Despite this, Davis believes that ERGs alone are not enough to foster a diverse workplace.

“While ERGs are certainly important and foundational, as we have grown over time I think we need to pay a lot more attention to data,” he said. “We use engagement surveys and inclusion surveys to really establish our priorities for the year and we want to be able to see what are the things that are going on for specific communities that we otherwise wouldn’t know about.”

Greenhouse currently has a dedicated diversity, equity and inclusion council made of volunteers across the organization that oversees this information and plays an active role in how policies are implemented. The company also has an ethics committee that is tied directly to Greenhouse’s product.

“We understand that within the recruiting realm there is a lot of risk associated with DE&I, so we want to make sure we are building products, tools and resources that tie into us walking the talk, and make sure our customers are also equipped to do the same.”

Part of his personal goal at Greenhouse is to show his clients what the aspirational state for diversity in the workplace is and connect them with how it will manifest through the work he does.

“A lot of recruiters religiously and exclusively source people through Linkedin, so by giving them additional spaces to search, you are able to extend and expand the pool out to different audiences,” he said.

Sign up now: Stay up to date, level up and hire better with our behind the scenes newsletters at the world’s top startups.