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There’s been a tremendous amount of attention paid to the concept of diversity, equity and inclusion [DEI] in today’s workplace. So, when it comes to hiring employees or vendors within the meetings and events arena, focusing on DEI initiatives take centerstage as association planners and their companies set their sights on establishing a culture that reflects the diversity found into today’s workforce.

“Culture fit” is not an unheard-of concept in hiring — when either hiring employees or vendors for an event, but it’s especially important when expanding a meeting planner’s DEI ambitions.

According to Elysca Fernandes, director of human resource research and advisory services at McLean & Company in London, Ontario, it’s important that meeting planners build a strategy on organizational diversity, equity and inclusion.

“Focusing on diversity hiring can come off as performative and risk a negative experience for hires from backgrounds currently underrepresented in the existing workforce and leadership team,” Fernandes said. “Several equity studies, including those in the events industry, have demonstrated the lack of representation of people of color in the leadership pipeline until today.”

From personal experience as an Indian woman who has been the “only” woman of color on past teams, Fernandes said the importance of building an understanding of equity and inclusion amongst current staff through a DEI strategy is critical to being ready for focusing authentically on diversity in hiring of both employees and vendors.

“Without this important first step of looking inwards and building a meaningful purpose of DEI, organizations risk being performative (focusing on diversity for appearances alone), burning out and losing talent,” Fernandes said.

Tiffanie Rosier, DE&I Chair for the International Live Events Association & Hotwire people & culture program manager, has seen more meeting professionals looking to create opportunities to diversify their staff by attending more professional development DE&I activities and training, and she’s seen people making more intentional efforts to promote opportunities through various in-person and online avenues.

“I’ve also seen more companies partner with other companies in order to increase their application pool or referral pools to attract more diverse talent,” Rosier said. “Also, more and more companies are removing barriers for job opportunities by replacing or excluding the ‘degree’ requirements. Many companies now use years of experience and actual work responsibilities as evaluation factors versus degree requirements.”

Steps to Take

Meghan Wozniak, senior meeting planner with the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), can’t speak to the overall organizational diversity hiring practices, as that falls within the human resources department of AASHTO. However, she has been involved with hiring diverse vendors for conferences throughout the U.S. where they host association meetings.

“In any given year, we may have over 30 meetings that could impact disadvantaged vendors,” Wozniak said. “Once a contract has been signed, typically one of my first tasks is to look for local vendors, then I narrow it down to socially and economically disadvantaged vendors.”

Wozniak noted that the shift toward DEI initiatives has been dramatic in recent years and can be felt through AASHTO’s conferences, committees and meetings.

“Our committees have been tasked to include DEI initiatives such as adding speakers and discussions focused on promoting and retention of the DEI community, building roadmaps for the future,” Wozniak said “You are giving back to the community if your vendor hiring practice states that you must look to the DEI community for your conference needs. For example, we had at our annual meeting in Indy this year we sourced our Taste of Indy from all local vendors.”

As part of DEI hiring practices, meeting planners should also focus on their talent attraction materials: Many organizations lose candidates before the recruitment process begins through outdated and non-inclusive job ads. That’s why Fernandes recommends meeting planners revisit job ads, and the requirements within them, with a critical eye for which requirements are nonessential to the role. They may be limiting the diversity of their talent pool, and in turn, the benefit of diverse experiences and perspectives on their products or services.

Fernandes said common non-critical requirements to look out for and remove are physical ability requirements, inflated years of experience or leadership requirements (especially since we are aware there are barriers to progression in all organizations), industry-specific experience when not required and gendered language. A quick and impactful “win” in the space is to re-check your job ads and marketing collateral (e.g., videos promoting your organization, employee value proposition materials on the careers page) for gender neutral language and alignment with the actual role being recruited for.

“Be as creative in reimagining hiring practices to improve the diversity of your workforce as you are in product or service innovation,” Fernandes said. “While it isn’t specific to meeting planning companies alone, the first piece of advice I provide to any organization is not getting caught up in how you recruited in the past. If you focus on building an amazing event experience and planning for it, focus on how you can build an amazing interview, branding and talent attraction interaction for candidates.”

For example, how an organization supports the well-being of their employees through flexibility and holistic well-being initiatives is a huge draw for candidates, especially as many individuals have revisited how they approach purpose at work in recent years. Fernandes recommends meeting planners consider the organization’s approach to employee well-being — is it holistic in supporting purpose, financial well-being, physical and emotional well-being, and creating a sense of belonging? How has it shifted during recent years? Additionally, be willing to listen to what a candidate needs to be successful in the role while meeting their unique needs and be willing to adapt accordingly.

“DEI has a huge impact in the hiring practices of today for both employees and vendors,” Fernandes said. “A key part of that is recognizing that people are unique with unique needs.”

Alongside recruiting as priority one, the second priority for meeting organizations is focusing on the employee experience, according to McLean & Company’s HR Trends Report 2024. Fernandes said a positive employee experience is not universal — and your current employees are a great source of feedback to candidates, whether it be through review sites or directly sharing their experiences with friends or family members who may be a great fit for a posted role.

“How an organization prioritizes the experience of their current employees from diverse backgrounds plays a big role in whether they resonate with candidates in their networks,” Fernandes said.

Dr. Ayanna Cummings, CDE, SPHR, owner, principal and CEO of Tapestry Consulting, said that ensuring equitable and just hiring and interviewing practices is critical for both human resource and diversity management. Such techniques as broad sourcing, targeted recruiting of diverse groups, structured interviewing and hiring procedures to ensure fair and objective standards are applied during candidate evaluation periods, writing inclusive job descriptions that have been decoded or language neutrality towards gender and ethnic inclusion, and equitable pay structures are just some of the ways that human resource and diversity management converge to create inclusive and equitable workplaces.

“Nowadays, blind hiring is the newest approach to fostering a more equitable and inclusive landscape where equal opportunity is paramount,” Cummings said. “Blind hiring achieves the manifest objective of reducing bias and adverse impact in the candidate selection process by removing the evaluators’ or hiring managers’ prior knowledge about the varying demographic dimensions of the candidate during the review process.”

Cummings stresses that DEI is at the forefront, leading the charge in the talent acquisition and talent management stages. They are also leading the internal strategic direction of cultural refinement and transformation that not only invite and open the door to diverse people and ideas, but also retain those ideologies and reflect such cultural practices in the ways they do business and the representation they display of diverse groups in senior and upper level executive roles, as well as in vendor partnerships.

“DEI is evolving. It is tackling what seems to be a Goliath in the form of artificial intelligence systems that historically disenfranchise and marginalize people of color, Blacks, indigenous, and other groups of diverse backgrounds,” Cummings said.

Susie Silver, senior consultant and innovation strategist at The Diversity Movement, a business management consultancy in Cary, NC, suggested that DEI is not an extra item on a list of things to check off, rather it should become a go-to realistic integration into every facet of an organization, including hiring employees and vendors.

“From thinking about what requirements are listed on a job description and reflecting on what requirements are ‘must-haves’ and what are ‘nice to haves’ (as often the ‘must haves’ are exclusionary to top talent), offering various options for interview environments, auditing the application process to ensure platforms and formats are accessible, ensuring job descriptions are not too long in length and have balanced inclusive language, and ensuring commonly used interview rubrics and questions to mitigate bias in the interview process — there are countless ways to integrate a DEI lens into the hiring process,” Silver said.

Mistakes To Avoid

As it relates to incorporating DEI initiatives in their hiring practices, the most common mistakes meeting planners and other companies make are centered in failing to see DEI as an organization-wide accountability.

“This is at the root of failing to provide resources to all involved in hiring on such things as inclusive hiring, building an intentional focus on continued awareness of DEI challenges and over-reliance on undefined notions of culture fit to eliminate candidates who do not share similarities (race, gender, age, perspective, or more) with the current team,” Fernandes said.

That’s why it’s important meeting planners expand their personal DEI learning journey and challenge themselves, and anyone else involved in hiring, to continuously adopt more inclusive hiring practices. As Fernandes pointed out, no one gets everything right the first time, but it is a learning journey that should be approached with curiosity, empathy and a commitment to continuous learning.

“If you hear the term “culture-fit,” or any vague comments about why a candidate is not a good fit, challenge what this means. I often encourage hiring teams to replace vague assumptions of culture fit with behavioral statements around their core competencies or values, especially those centered on inclusion, to continue to build a workforce that prioritizes DEI,” Fernandes said.

Cummings added that we must get out of the notion that “diversity” is a dirty word. Diversity celebrates a vast mosaic of the human experience, including but certainly not limited to the classical dimensions of race and gender, and beyond those classical notions into such evolving demographic dimensions as parental status, educational and socioeconomic background, weight, height and other characteristics that make individuals unique in our society.

“Meeting planners, like any other hiring managers, likely fall into the trap of ostracizing ‘diverse hires’ and creating a ‘tokenism’ perception that actually toxifies the culture and misperceives persons of diverse cultural backgrounds as somehow inferior with respect to ability or experience,” Cummings said. “In fact, as we embrace diversity and inclusion, we must also remain self-aware and check our own biases and misgivings about groups that are different than our own at the door if we want to provide everyone a fair shot at actualizing to their potential.”

Silver said some other common mistakes being made around the DEI hiring initiatives for employees and vendors include job descriptions that are too long in length and include too many specific requirements that in turn exclude many qualified candidates from even considering applying for the job.

“Also, interview processes that span numerous interview sessions over multiple months, as well as not communicating with candidates in a timely manner (whether they are offered a position or not), are other mistakes being made,” Silver said. “Also leaders within the same organization using different structures and questions to interview candidates, can lead to bias decisions in hiring.”

The Perfect Fit

Look at diversity-friendly sites curated by professionals from diverse backgrounds to locate meeting and event planners, as well as vendors, who are certified, experienced, talented and also happen to be from diverse backgrounds. Cummings said targeting your search efforts will likely yield many results from which to select the top candidate for the job you posted.

Tapestry Consulting is a DEI Consultancy, with multiple subsidiaries that serve various functions as subspecialties. They typically use broad search platforms that are AI-enabled such as Zip Recruiter to gather several resumes for review. Upon review of the applicant pool using a resume database search, the Tapestry Consulting team also simultaneously conducts research on the job function or title that they will be hiring for in an effort to structure questions that relate specifically to competencies in that area.

“When the interviewing begins, we give multiple candidates an opportunity to interview for the roles, including those who may differ in some small way from the stated qualifications or experiential background we are hoping to find,” Cummings said. “This actually serves our purposes more so, because it invites diversity to the table in the form of skill set and experiential background, giving a new and fresh perspective to the job to be performed should such a candidate be selected to move forward for the position.”

Cummings also suggested planners target the incubation of talent by partnering with an organization that is geared toward the training and professional development of diverse people in the meetings and events industry. For instance, in the event and meeting planning field there are several such organizations, including the National Coalition of Black Meeting Professionals. Go to their events, get involved, network, post your positions using their career center databases, and you will find top notch talent that will exceed your expectations.

It is also vital that association meeting planners make intentional connections with people and organizations you would generally not engage with. Oftentimes these connections lead to meaningful relationships that can help expand your diverse pipeline for talent.

“I generally like to have people think of talent as an ‘add’ not a ‘fit.’ Think about what a candidate can add to the team, culture and organization. The opportunity in the language is to open up diversity of thought, innovation, creativity, etc.,” Silver said.

“Meeting planners and association meeting planners must expand how to think about events for inclusion. For example, vendor supplier diversity is a key way to expand inclusion, engaging with partners (speakers) that use inclusive language and have accessible approaches to content being shared, registration forms including things such as asking for names, pronouns, accommodation requests and dietary requests.”

No company or person is perfect, said Rosier. So, not everyone will get diverse hiring practices perfect 100% of the time.

“I do, however, believe that an authentic focus on how to create not only diverse hiring practices, but also implementing diversity related training, continuing education and support in the workplace/association will help to retain top talent,” concluded Rosier. “Companies should always stay on top of hiring topics and trends and strive to make their company the first company of choice for candidates.” | AC&F |