Technology has made it easier than ever to source high-quality candidates, here’s what you need to do next to make your selection process doesn’t fall prey to inherent bias.

Recruiting strategies are ever-evolving. With the advents of email, social media, networking profiles, and even specialized recruiting websites, many of the challenges of finding great talent have been significantly rectified.

Specialists are no longer scratching their heads, wondering where to look for their next great recruit. Talent is abundantly present. But with the latest evolutions in the talent search come the responsibility and obligation for recruiters to ask if they’re searching fairly, doing everything in their power to create an inclusive workforce.

Recruiters are the gatekeepers of any organization, deciding whose voices are allowed to come in and shape the future of your mission. In order to ensure that mission is not lacking in a variety of perspectives and experience, consider the following tips on how to recruit with inclusion intentionally in mind.

Language in job descriptions

Did you know you can create a more inclusive workforce even before a candidate comes in to interview? Do this by considering the way language plays a role in which candidates apply.

Whether intentionally or not, certain job descriptions can turn away applicants with the implications of their verbiage. While it’s illegal to discriminate against candidates for factors such as their gender or age, some job descriptions will inadvertently steer candidates away because they sound too “young” or “male-centric.”

According to job listing site Indeed.com, the use of the word “ninja” in job descriptions increased 400 percent from January 2012 to October 2016. “Rockstar” is another buzzword in hiring these days. Recruiters may have thought they were cracking a code by using a gender neutral term to increase interest, but is that really the case?

For one, ninjas are rarely portrayed as women in popular media. Also, what age do you think the word “ninja” is going to attract? Typically, it’s a word applied in job listings for tech startups, or other organizations looking for young hires. Don’t say you want customer success rockstars, say you want candidates who are naturally skilled at communication. In general, avoid cliches.

Ad location for job listings

According to Inc, 79 percent of job seekers use social media in their search. But where are the other 21 percent?

If your recruiting process focuses on one channel or method, you’re missing a lot of talent elsewhere. To attract diverse applicants, use diverse methods. It’s possible your perfect candidate is still passing out resumes when you only accept applications online.

This isn’t to say you should revert to outdated processes. Rather, hiring teams should look to e-recruiting and make your company and roles accessible on a number of platforms. If you’re looking for candidates with 15+ years of experience, you shouldn’t post that ad solely on the same platforms where you’re asking for entry-level candidates.

Focusing on talent vs experience

Resources suggest that in order to be more inclusive, hiring managers and recruiters should focus less on exact experience and more on what the candidate could, and would need to accomplish. Give them opportunities to paint their talents as it pertains to the job.

Entrepreneur provides a helpful guide on Why, and How, to Hire for Potential Over Experience. This article encourages you to use the interview as an opportunity to speak beyond the resume, asking industry-related questions, as well as querying personal experience.

Canned questions

One way to reduce unconscious bias in your hiring and recruiting process is to have a list of canned questions you ask across the board. At their core, interviews are a conversation, and no two will be the same. As you meet different candidates, their experience may spur the conversation in another direction. This is okay! The idea with canned questions isn’t to kill the natural flow of an interview. It’s to send you into interviews with similar expectations of what each candidate needs to live up to. There’s no reason to make one jump through hoops, while another has a smooth-sailing, easy-going conversation.

Use specialized agencies or networks

Maybe you’re trying all of these tips, and are still having a hard time diversifying your candidates and prioritizing inclusion. Your current network is often so good at providing top quality candidates it’s easy to overlook the need to expand beyond that inner circle.

But the benefits of a diversified workplace are numerous: not only for your company, but also for everyone who works there.

According to an article published by Bentley University, “Research has shown that having a diverse workforce increases a company’s profits. Diverse companies also have more success in attracting talented employees, keeping their workforce engaged, and driving innovation.”

That’s not all. The article goes on to provide exact statistics as to how diversity affects workplace success.

“Companies with the most gender-diverse executive teams are 21 percent more likely to experience above-average profitability than companies with the least gender-diverse executive teams, according to a 2018 report from McKinsey & Company. When it comes to ethnic and cultural diversity, companies with the most diverse executive teams are 33 percent more likely to outperform companies with the least diverse executive teams, the report found. ”

If your network is producing one type of candidate, leverage other resources. There are agencies that exist to help you expand beyond the same pool of candidates you’ve been swimming in for years. Make working with agencies for people with disabilities, or people of disenfranchised ethnicities, a key part in your recruiting processes.  

Good luck!

Recruiters have the privilege of meeting all kinds of people and learning about their backgrounds and varied histories. It’s a privilege to be able to hear about the lives of others and to be a part of offering them the opportunity to grow at your organization. But even more so, it’s a privilege to your organization to be able to learn from others.

Follow these tips for recruiting inclusively and your workplace is bound to be better for it.

In their shiny new e-commerce avatar, can battered AA rebrand, be forgiven by justice-minded Millennials, and embraced by woke Gen Zers?

For Sam, Tuesdays meant one thing –  the conference call. For one hour each week, every American Apparel store manager, visual merchandiser, and back-stock director the world over dialed into stream-of-consciousness rants from then-CEO Dov Charney, each employee praying they weren’t the unlucky soul singled out for reprimand.

During his three years working at AA stores in Seattle, Sam, a sales associate turned visual merchandiser, became accustomed to what he describes as the company head’s “Trump-esque” tirades. Some store manager in Ann Arbor would be called out for slow sales, or a back-stock director in Tel Aviv would be given a raise for suggesting a new sock color. It was that arbitrary and unpredictable. Sam didn’t love the work, but he wanted to be part of such a cool brand.

Back then, there was a certain prestige in being connected with the hyper-sexual, made-in-America label. The clothes were cool and ethically made, the aesthetic was very “in”, and anyone who worked there was “in” by extension. But, while AA had all the right optics, the reality of working there was not in line with its image.

Looking back, Sam says his hours were routinely taken away as punishment for “infractions”, and understaffing put unnecessary pressure on store managers who were “mainly a bunch of 19 and 20-year-old kids trying to figure it out on the fly.”

AA filed for Chapter 11 in November, 2016, with $234.9 million in debts, a steep descent from its peak profitability of $634 million in 2013. Bad news for hipsters now required to seek a new neon bodysuit supplier, but comeuppance for employees who came to see the oversexualized, super skinny, white AF label as all that’s wrong with the fashion world.

When Sam heard that his former employer was back, this time online-only, he couldn’t help shaking his head. “Honestly, I thought it was foolish. They just aren’t relevant anymore. There are other brands doing the same thing with less bad press.”

All the same, and for better or worse, AA is back. The new site, launched last August in the US and globally just this April, features a “back to basics” campaign, complete with iconic neon bodysuits, crop tops, hoodies, and all the rest. The difference between American Apparel then and American Apparel now seems to be, essentially, the absence of brick-and-mortar sales points, and a tacked-on mantra-du-jour of “diversity and inclusiveness”. The April press release stated new AA models would be “real people who represent a diversity of body types, ages and ethnicities.”

But can our memories really be that short? Could AA truly now be all #goodvibesonly, or are someone’s shiny disco pants on fire? The challenge in courting of Millennials and Gen Zers will be proving authenticity in a political climate that demands corporate integrity in exchange for brand loyalty.

Sarah Wilson, Head of People at SmartRecruiters, and former director of talent acquisition for Aritzia, has no illusions about what AA is up against in their search for redemption in this day and age. “It’s a really competitive industry to begin with, but rebranding now, on the heels of movements like #timesup and #metoo, will be an uphill battle, more so than it would have been five years ago, or will be five years from now.”

This challenge is even more pronounced for a brand whose ad campaigns cashed in on the sexy-skirting-pervy vibe, ever since its first store opened in LA in 2003. The AA aesthetic, often described as “porntastic” and previously lauded as edgy, crossed into creepy once its founder and CEO, Dov Charney, admitted to masturbating in front of a female reporter from Jane. This opened the doors for a slew of complaints from employees claiming sexual harassment, all of which ended in a $3M payout from the company, and $9.3M in legal fees.

AA’s current head of brand marketing, Sabina Weber, claimed in a recent interview with Fashionista that “the brand is still sexy, but it’s about a woman’s choice to be sexy; it’s in the gaze; it’s ‘If I wanna show my ass to the world, I’m gonna show my ass to the world’.”

The first picture is a swimsuit campaign from the brand’s latest iteration, while the “Spring Fever” addition is taken from the AA archives. The difference is negligible, even if, under the wing of their Canadian acquirer, Gildan Activewear, the company raised the minimum age of models to 21, and in their most recent casting call requested they be over 25.

It could be argued, however, that anyone over 25 remembers AA scandals like the “teens do it better” t-shirt – created in collaboration with Ey! Magateen, a magazine “celebrating the sexuality of young men”, which used models as young as 16. AA also owned the maxim “all press is good press” by notoriously having ads banned for sexualizing school-age girls.

Other efforts of the new dispensation include employing more female photographers, and sourcing brand ambassadors from social media – the people they refer to as “real models” – and staffing AA HQ with roughly 25 mostly young, mostly female employees. (In its heyday the label employed 10,000 people.)

So what more can AA do to let consumers and candidates know it’s taking this second chance seriously? For Joel Cheesman, employer branding expert and founder of Ratedly – an employer reputation management platform – it’s simple: “People are willing to forgive when you admit wrongdoing and outline the ways change will occur.”

If you ever find yourself in AA’s situation, Cheesman suggests ridding yourself of anyone in a leadership position from the past, particularly the CEO, bring in people with a flawless background to lead the company, and spin how tomorrow is “a new day and a fresh start” to the media.

American Apparel may be off to a good start in re-establishing themselves as socially conscious, but even with the figurehead gone – and running a copycat company called LA Apparel – have the hiring practices he created really been eradicated, and if so, what else needs to change for AA to claim a true transformation?

As Dov Charney has said in the past, “I am in the DNA of the company,” and it’s true, but his imprint is pathological. The dysfunction is in the proverbial company fabric, and it’s going to be hard to get the Dov stank off these ethically made clothes.

To wit, the following email that internal AA investigators, keen on finding evidence to oust the troublesome CEO, found addressed to Charney from a female employee:

Add this to other accounts of Charney yelling racial slurs, sending pornographic emails to employees, then later, during the investigation, requesting workers to “delete any naughty emails”.

Meanwhile, AA stores had taken on a different type of toxicity, mostly in hiring and firing practices. “There were no standards of how employees should be treated, or how managers should act,” Sam recalls, “and this behavior went right up the chain to corporate.”

At 19, Sam was hired by a friend who managed a Seattle AA store. A few weeks later he was promoted to floor manager. “I don’t think anyone looked at my resume, I just showed up and was hired. I don’t think most people were actually qualified for the jobs they had.”

Six months in, Sam was upped to visual merchandiser. “To this day I don’t know if I did everything a visual merchandiser is supposed to do, ” he admits. “I placed orders, arranged the store and made sure I enforced the dress code,” which was to wear American Apparel, head to toe. “That meant if someone broke the dress code, the choice was to buy something on the spot or go home.

“We were required to keep the store open an hour past close if we were within $100 of our sales goal. Once I couldn’t stay late, and the next week I saw my hours were cut from 32 to 4. I followed up with my manager and then the district manager, but I was just put in a circle of them referring back to one another. No one would give me a straight answer.”

In 2010, Gawker published a series of anonymous AA employee recountings, which let readers into the catty chaos behind the Helvetica storefronts. For example:

And there were specific conditions on hiring black women:

“It’s an extremely fine line for apparel companies, between articulating brand image and discriminatory hiring practices,” says Smartrecruiters’ Sarah Wilson. “American Apparel isn’t alone in that. It’s a broad challenge in the fashion industry.”

The company will undoubtedly seek out new employees who know and love the brand’s aesthetic, but in the digital space, no one will have to physically embody it: consumer-facing retail positions are generally entry level, whereas UX designers and digital marketers have university degrees or equivalent experience, which both raise the age of entry, and shift focus from appearance to qualifications. “With an e-commerce candidate,” explains Wilson, “it will be less about what you wear to the interview, and more about how you describe the brand’s aesthetic.”

As opposed to the scalability of employee hotness, the label is making a great push to bring its socially conscious side to the forefront, even if it can no longer boast it’s all “Made In America”.  With the global relaunch, clothes will be made in both the US and “sweatshop-free” factories in the developing world. Consumers can choose the product source, with the American-made version costing between 17 and 26 percent more.

Without the founder’s nefarious ways to overshadow them, AA’s strides in labor standards could actually garner some good press – including new 24/7 medical clinics for workers in Central America. Charney may have even given American Apparel an unintended boost by taking his bad rep, along with much of the same branding, models, and even former AA employees to LA Apparel.

“I knew Dov,” reflects Sam. “ but I didn’t know about the sexual harassment until it came out in the press. I don’t know what happened, but I err on the side of believing the women, so I couldn’t work for him again.”

And what about American Apparel? What if they asked Sam to come back?

“Nope.”