DePaul's mission impels every member of our community to join in the quest to end hatred and racism and to work together on reform. One step in this effort is to ensure that all managers at DePaul who are in the position to hire new employees are trained on issues of diversity, equity and inclusion.
To this end, the Talent Acquisition team in the Office of Human Resources is including a training for all managers within the staff employee hiring process, beginning in June. The 24-minute online training course, titled "Unconscious Bias," offers information to:
- Recognize when unconscious bias occurs and why it's important to understand
- Explore how unconscious bias is relevant in institutions
- Identify three strategies to counteract potential unconscious bias
- Define confirmation bias
- Review the meaning of the "Halo Effect"
- Explore the effects groupthink can have in a professional setting
Once the process for hiring a staff employee begins, the Talent Acquisition team will assign the training course to the manager through BlueSky Learning.
The inclusion of this training is just one addition to existing efforts that the Talent Acquisition team takes to ensure that job posting and interviewing for staff employees promotes a diverse workforce across the university. These efforts include:
- All open jobs are posted to diverse websites via JobTarget, DePaul's compliance vendor. The Higher Education Recruitment Consortium (HERC) also represents DePaul at diverse conferences and events and helps attract diverse talent to DePaul.
- Hiring managers can request an applicant diversity report without candidate names during the search process to ensure a diverse pool of candidates. If there is a need to increase the diversity of the candidate pool, the job is posted to additional niche sites and organizations that target underrepresented populations.
- The annual Affirmative Action Plan report provides information on university departments that have underrepresentation within their teams. When a new position becomes available in one of these departments, recruitment efforts focus on attracting a pool of diverse qualified candidates to fill the vacancy.
- Minority-owned business are always invited to participate in the RFP process when choosing a search firm for executive positions.
The Talent Acquisition team looks forward to continuing to partner with managers to ensure that factors related to diversity, equity and inclusion are integrated into the staff employee hiring process. We will continue to leverage a multipronged strategy to combat explicit and implicit practices of exclusion and structural racism. For any questions about hiring full- or part-time staff employees, contact the Talent Acquisition team at 312-362-6855 or
staffing@depaul.edu.