Regarding your article on HR and diversity (One in three HR leaders face opposition to inclusion schemes, study finds, 3 May), I was director of HR for the European sales division of Ford in the 1980s. I was concerned that our graduate hiring in the UK for the sales division was overwhelmingly white males and we were not satisfied with how we selected them.
Rather than embark on a diversity initiative as such, we decided to work to improve our selection process on the assumption that the talent we were looking for was evenly distributed by gender and race. We spent time defining what the sales department wanted in its hiring by interviewing the more successful hires about their job and their performance. From that we devised a selection process to find such ability in our future hires.
We changed the application form to search for the specific background education and achievements that we sought; we introduced verbal and numeric reasoning tests that mirrored the work graduates did; and restructured the interview process and introduced group exercises on typical tasks that people would face on the job. We retrained all the line managers involved in selection.
We implemented the new approach and almost immediately our hiring profile matched our application rate. Although we had plenty of female applicants, we were a bit light on ethnic minority applicants. We later did some work to fix that.
The line managers were amazed at the quality of candidates that our improved, more objective and job-related tests produced. Professional HR managers might do well to follow this approach.
Ed Sketch
Former director of education, training and development, Ford Motor Company
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