What is “Diverse Slate” Hiring? (2026 Update)

Joanne Derecho
Latest posts by Joanne Derecho (see all)

If you want to boost diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, a “diverse slate” hiring strategy is a great way to achieve this goal.

Here’s a quick “diverse slate” definition:

Diverse slate hiring is a talent acquisition strategy where you start with a diverse pool of qualified candidates. And, you’ll intentionally search for (and interview) talent from diverse backgrounds, identities, or experiences.

Maxine Williams, Global Director of Diversity at Meta (formerly Facebook), made a point about diverse slate hiring in 2017:

“The more people you interview who don’t look or think like you, the more likely you are to hire someone from a diverse background.”

Tip: Using job description software (like Ongig) that scans for unconscious bias is a great starting point for a diverse slate approach.

 

Why does “diverse slate hiring” matter?

Slate diversity is vital in a world where only 7% of techies are Black. Where women hold only 26.5% of executive roles and only 21.1% of board members at S&P companies are women.  Also, women of color hold fewer than 1% of all CEO positions at S&P companies. These are just a few statistics solidifying the need for a diverse slate hiring strategy.

 

Where did the concept of “diverse slate hiring” come from?

The NFL, interestingly enough, helped launch diverse slate hiring with the implementation of the Rooney Rule in 2003. This rule requires minority representation among the coaching staff.

With the rule, the number of coaches belonging to underrepresented groups increased from a low 6% to 22% in 4 short years. After the success of the strategy in the NFL, it’s been implemented in many other American businesses. 

The NFL even created a diversity committee in 2022 after being sued by former Miami Dolphin Head Coach Brian Flores for alleged discrimination and racism in hiring practices.

 

Which brands have adopted “slate diversity” in hiring?

Two companies who are vocal about successfully implementing the diverse slate approach are Meta’s Facebook and BASF.

Facebook launched its diverse slate approach to hiring in 2015, and in 2017, the company gave an update:

  • the number of women globally rose from 33% to 35%
  • the number of women in tech increased from 17% to 19%
  • women make up 27% of all new graduate hires in engineering and 21% of all new technical hires
  • In the US, they increased Hispanic representation from 4% to 5% and Black people from 2% to 3%

BASF‘s diverse slate hiring commitment is to increase the proportion of women in leadership positions to 30% worldwide by 2030.

And, In 2015, BASF set out to increase the proportion of women in leadership roles to 22-24% as of 2021. At the end of 2019, they achieved it ahead of schedule at 23%.

 

How do you implement a “diverse slate” approach?

So, how do you start implementing slate diversity?

Here are some takeaways from a Harvard report you might try first:

1. Think of diversity and your staffing needs. Diversity is a broad concept. Craft a solid definition of what diversity means to your company with your team. This involves looking into your own biases, conscious or unconscious. It’s essential to be aware of these biases when hiring. And last, assess the diversity of your current team so you can find the best people to fill in the gaps. Gather details on your workforce’s demographics, particularly race, gender, age, disability status, veteran status, etc. Then, benchmark your organization’s diversity metrics with industry standards and best practices. 

Also, as AI becomes more readily available, it is important to ensure that your program’s training data stays bias-free. These would include a thorough review of your recruitment algorithms across every candidate channel and touchpoint. AI can be a formidable ally in assessing real-time market intelligence to identify perspective gaps within your workforce and how to fill them quickly. Review key questions such as: “Is my AI hiring for potential or simply based on past patterns? Do my hiring processes include other commonly overlooked aspects of inclusion, such as cognitive diversity? 

2. Get leadership support.  Gaining support from the leadership teams is an important factor for the success of your diverse slate hiring initiatives. Here are several strategies to effectively secure and maintain leadership support:

Show how diversity slate hiring contributes to your company’s overall business goals by explaining the positive impact of diversity, such as market competitiveness, reduced employee turnover costs, enhanced employee engagement, and expanded customer base. Share research, case studies, employee stories, and testimonials to demonstrate the positive effects of your diversity efforts. 

Additionally, explain to leadership how the company must strictly adhere to D&I-related legal and regulatory requirements to avoid lawsuits, penalties, and damage to its reputation. 

  • Include the management team when creating your diverse slate policies. Encourage them to join the process by participating in diverse hiring panels to understand how it works and its importance firsthand.  Involve them in mentorship programs that support underrepresented employees, fostering direct engagement.
  • Offer diversity training sessions on unconscious biases, inclusive leadership, and the benefits of diverse teams for all leaders. Inclusive intelligence is one critical leadership skill that companies could prioritize. The intelligence refers to the practice of normalizing inclusive practices at work, which eventually results in a more diverse and better engaged workforce. 
  • Create a supportive infrastructure. Provide leaders with the resources and tools they need to understand and support diversity hiring initiatives, such as access to recruitment and D & I reports 
  • Implement reverse mentoring where leaders can be paired with underrepresented talent. These arrangements could lead to a broader diversification of opinions and decision-making within the organization and forge an ecosystem of transparency. More importantly, leaders can experience firsthand the barriers and challenges faced by talent and remedy the situation with practical solutions. 
  • Create a dedicated diversity and inclusion team to support leaders in executing and measuring diversity initiatives. D&I teams function as the inclusive architects within an organization by steering diversity efforts. They should offer in-depth analyses and  intervention playbooks for maintaining psychological safety and driving higher performance throughout the workforce.

Pro tip: Consider making diversity a performance metric to encourage greater buy-in among leaders and managers. By weaving diversity practices into a company’s core operations, employer branding strengthens with increased productivity. Making diversity quantifiable results in a more convincing case through proof, such as tying metrics with organizational ROX (return on experience).  

3. Set clear goals and objectives. Once you understand diversity, HR leaders should set SMART goals to actualize your target diversity outcome: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. 

Examples: 

  • Increase the number of women in leadership roles (e.g., director level and above) to 30% within the next two years.
  • Increase the representation of person of color (e.g., Black, Latinx, Asian) in the overall workforce to 10% within two years.
  • Ensure all job postings and hiring processes are accessible to candidates with disabilities within the next six months.
  • Improve the retention rate of underrepresented employees by 15% over the next three years.
  • Implement unconscious bias training programs for talent acquisition teams and hiring managers within six months.
  • Making recruitment interface 100% WCAG 2.2 compliant. This is the current global industry standard for accessibility. This ensures that every candidate has a fair job application experience via universal design. In other words, companies don’t lose valuable talent due to their user interface.

Pro tip: Combining SMART with live data accountability establishes a climate of trust and authenticity. Companies can improve diverse slate hiring across talent pipelines by reviewing equity metrics in real-time and fixing pipeline leaks without delay. 

For instance, Aon applied a factual data-supported approach toward assessing candidate’s key strengths for an engineering company. By removing bias, the engineering firm saw:

  • 19% increase in female hires.
  • 200% participation in talent participation by underrepresented groups. 

4. Recruit diversely.

Set your sights wide and recruit externally to build diverse candidate pools. Here are different strategies to execute inclusive hiring: 

  • Source candidates from diverse pools.  Partner with organizations and institutions that support diverse groups.  Attend job fairs, conferences, and events focused on diversity. Use diverse job boards and professional networks to advertise open positions:

Blackjobs.com – features the latest well-paying job opportunities for African American job seekers

Hispano Latino Professional Association (HLPA) – recruit professionals in the Hispanic / Latino Community.

Diversity Job Board – list job opportunities from employers targeting minorities, female candidates, and persons with disabilities 

  • Implement blind recruitment techniques and skill-based hiring. To minimize unconscious bias, mask candidate information (e.g., names, gender, and age) from resumes during the screening process. Use blind interview platforms for initial interviews that allow recruiters to interact with candidates via chat, email, or audio calls while keeping candidates’ details private. Evaluate job seekers’ skill sets and future work performance through skills-based tests or challenges. Performance-based trials are an effective way for an objective assessment of a talent’s abilities. Implementing performance-focused challenges during the recruitment process enables neurodivergent talent to showcase their suitability for a role, in situations where they may struggle with standard interview questions.   

And make sure your job descriptions are readable and bias-free. If you want to automate this process, Ongig can help you craft the perfect JDs…fast. 

Ongig’s Text Analyzer flags gender and racial-biased language in your job descriptions and suggests inclusive alternatives so you attract more applicants of color. For example, you can replace ‘young and energetic’ with a more inclusive term, ‘motivated’ or ‘enthusiastic.’

5. Create diverse interview panels. Gather people who are different from each other when you’re putting together an interview team. This diverse team will have different but considerate ways of looking at candidates’ different cultures and characteristics.  

To bring different perspectives, include members from various teams, departments, and levels within the company. Involve ERG members or Diversity and Inclusion committees. If diversity is limited within your organization, consider inviting external experts or DEI consultants to participate in the interview process. They improve diversity standards by enforcing the best global practices in candidate selection. External auditors also minimize the risk of groupthink, where TA teams may make irrational or unfair decisions due to an unconscious desire for conformity. 

Once you have established your interview team, rotate them regularly to allow different employees to participate and bring fresh points of view. Maintain a diverse pool of interviewers that can be tapped anytime during different hiring processes.

6. Build structured interview processes. Use standardized interview questions to ensure all candidates are assessed fairly: 

  • Job-related technical questions or practical exercises to measure the candidate’s competency 
  • Behavioral questions to evaluate past work experience 
  • Situational questions to determine the applicant’s problem solving skills and how to approach hypothetical work situations. These present a view of the candidate’s practical abilities, notably soft skills that are critical for workplace resilience and cross-departmental collaborations.  
  • Standardized questions to examine the applicant’s basic qualifications and cultural contribution. Questions should be evidence-based to avoid biases that may result from interpersonal communication. Preferably, there should be a centralized system or matrix for an objective evaluation, such as a Likert score. Quantitative scoring keeps assessments professional without involving subjective comments that could influence the final decision. 

Create an evaluation criteria and scoring system to evaluate candidates’ responses objectively.

7. Train Hiring Managers and Recruiters. All HR member teams should receive unconscious bias training. This training covers different prejudices, biases, and stereotypes and helps identify biases that might influence employment decisions. 

Talent Dimensions offers inclusive recruitment, selection, and hiring training to help you better understand D & I and why they’re essential in the workplace. It will guide you in examining your current recruitment process and finding ways to make it more inclusive. You also gain skills for focusing on inclusive recruiting and selecting top talent. 

As organizations increasingly prioritize the importance of inclusion and diversity, it has become vital to develop stronger inclusion intelligence within the company. This means that TA teams must constantly upskill and acquire specialized methods needed to mitigate/prevent diversity-related conflict at work even before they occur.  These may include undergoing expert-level courses on confirmation biases and relationship-building with underrepresented members in niche talent communities. 

8. Set KPIs. To know if your strategies are working, you need to measure them. As such, it’s critical to establish metrics to get concrete results for your recruiting practices. Some of the most common metrics are: 

  • Monitor the number and percentage of underrepresented talent at various stages of your hiring procedures: applications, interviews, offers, and hires 
  • Analyze the diversity of your talent pool to ensure that a diverse pool of applicants is considered for promotions 
  • Monitor your diversity recruiting channels, such as social media, job boards, and career events, to gauge which platforms are most effective in attracting diverse talent.

Regularly analyze your diverse hiring data to identify areas for improvement and adjust strategies accordingly. Proactive data governance ensures candidate parity throughout the pipeline, so TA leaders can efficiently identify and intervene in diversity gaps. 

9. Establish reporting systems. Create monthly, quarterly, or annual reports to review the progress of your diversity hiring programs. The information can be found on your ATS or recruitment analytics software. Frequent audits enable teams to consistently spot bottlenecks and enhance interviews. 

Once you generate the data analytics reports, present the findings to your leadership team, employees, and external partners. Hold managers and leaders accountable for meeting diversity goals through performance evaluations and incentives. 

If possible, teams should consider automating talent pipeline management to accurately track drop-off rates for specific demographics at different stages of candidate management. This enables predictive intervention if required. 

AI-driven automation also presents a thorough review of intersectional data. That way, TA teams can reveal subgroup experiences (e.g., BIPOC women) for a more granular approach to diverse slate hiring.   

10. Continuously improve and refine your diverse hiring process. Survey and interview candidates and new hires about the hiring process.  In your reports, look for patterns or trends that indicate where the process is succeeding or failing in diversity goals. 

Based on feedback and reports, adjust your hiring process as needed. It may be updating your job descriptions, changing job interview questions, or using different sourcing channels. Take advantage of artificial intelligence tools to boost your unbiased hiring practices. 

Adjust your diversity goals and strategies based on feedback, progress, and changing business needs.

Pro tip: For comprehensive feedback, consider including feedback for pre-hiring and withdrawing applicants. Doing so provides a better understanding of the unique challenges faced by job seekers at different application stages. Also, it is important to constantly update your JDs (rather than annually) in real-time where possible for maximized engagement and conversion. 

 

Why I wrote this?

Ongig enables your diverse slate hiring by eliminating biases from your job ads, so you attract a diverse pool of candidates. Text Analyzer also conveniently speeds up JD creation via a smart templating feature, ideal for scaling at the enterprise level. Request a demo to see it in action today!

Shout-outs:

  1. Recruiting for Diversity (Harvard Whitepaper)
  2. Facebook Diversity Update: Building a More Diverse, Inclusive Workforce (by Maxine Williams, Meta)
  3. BASF wants to promote more women in leadership positions (by Antje Schabacker)
  4. How Effective is the Diverse Slate Approach to Hiring? (by Katica Roy, Pipeline)
  5. Does Diverse Hiring Work? (by Manasi Patel, Lattice)
  6. IT snapshot: Ethnic diversity in the tech industry (by Galen Gruman)
  7. What is Inclusive Intelligence?: Changing the D&I Landscape (by Billy Vaughn)
  8. Five Unconventional Ways to Build a More Diverse Talent Pipeline (By Aon)
  9. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2

by in Diversity and Inclusion