Corporate America has pulled back its diversity, equity, and inclusion practices, wary of being caught in the Trump administration’s crosshairs.
Yet it was only a little while ago that companies were clamoring to show they were trying to diversify. For some brands, efforts to place people without degrees into good jobs was an essential part of that.
The Big Idea: So it begs the question, will DEI take skills-based hiring down with it?
The short answer? No. Or at the very least, not completely, according to experts who advise companies and closely monitor their moves.
What you may see is a rhetorical reframing around skills-based hiring practices, says JB Holston, a senior advisor at Boston Consulting Group and former CEO of the Greater Washington Partnership. Rather than emphasizing diversity and reaching people who are underrepresented in their industries, companies are likely to use language that refers more to the company’s bottom line. Terms may change and employers may alter partnerships with institutions that serve a specific group, like historically Black colleges or tribal colleges. Employers that work with government contracts are likely to be especially sensitive.
“Companies still need access to the broadest and deepest pipeline of talent possible,” Holston says. “If they have to reframe the way they go about doing that, they’ll do it.”
Some already are. The group OneTen, for example, started as a coalition of several dozen of the country’s largest companies committed to training, hiring, and promoting 1M Black workers without four-year degrees within 10 years. It launched in the wake of the nationwide protests around George Floyd’s murder, at a time when many Fortune 500 companies were making highly public diversity commitments.
As recently as January 6, OneTen specified its focus on Black talent and on equity and inclusion on its home page and in other materials, according to publicly available archives, but it no longer does. The group, which did not respond to an interview request by press time, now advertises a more general focus on skills-based hiring.
For the most part, things are frozen as businesses wait to see how Trump’s attacks on DEI continue to unfold.
“No one knows where the line is going to be,” Holston says. “No one knows what the second- or third-order effect on their businesses are going to be if they trip some of these things.”
On The Ground: Earlier this year, 47% of executives surveyed by the employment law firm Littler said they expect to see DEI commitments remain the same, even as the concept becomes increasingly polarized.
But even companies that were seemingly all-in on DEI in the workplace are doing some tinkering. J.P. Morgan Chase, whose CEO in January rebuffed anti-DEI activists, has traded the “E” in DEI for an “O,” for “opportunity,” according to reporting from HR Dive.
“The ‘e’ always meant equal opportunity to us, not equal outcomes,” the company’s COO wrote in a memo viewed by HR Dive.
Cole Napper, vice president of research, innovation, and talent insights at Lightcast, similarly says there could be cuts to practices and programs if they were framed solely as DEI endeavors. But what’s more common is that companies are doubling down on the actual practice of skills-based hiring. Part of that is due to changing workforce demographics that may make it harder for employers to fill jobs. Corporate leaders have recognized the benefits of widening their talent pipelines, and it’s unlikely they will leave that fully behind.
“Skills-based hiring was a hot topic the last few years, but it’s actually going to become a necessity in the next few years,” Napper says.
The Business Case: Some in corporate America have been adamant that they are not backing down from opening the aperture on hiring. The Society for Human Resource Management, or SHRM, for example, is the largest professional society for HR professionals. The organization has promoted skills-based hiring as a beneficial business practice, not as a moral imperative.
“I believe that SHRM is 100% in on skills-first hiring and advancement strategies,” says Clay Lord, senior program director at the organization’s foundation. “The way we talk about it at SHRM is solidly through a business case.”
Prominent people at SHRM, including board chair Betty Thompson, have spoken publicly about the benefits of breaking down traditional hiring practices.
“It is clear to all of us that the status quo is not sustainable,” Lord says. “A skills-first future is inevitable.”
Angela Jackson, CEO of the labor market intelligence firm Future Forward Strategies, says companies are beginning to collect data about the results of certain hiring practices. Once the return on investment is clear, those practices will continue. Her new book, The Win-Win Workplace, argues this point.
“This is not about a moral thing to do around inclusivity,” says Jackson. “[Companies] need to invest in different talent because they have different customers and they want the shared lived experience of their customers. But we just need to be a bit more explicit around saying, ‘We have evidence, we have data that this strategy actually works,’ rather than just being under a label of DEI.”
“What we’re switching to is just good business practices,” she adds.