Behaviorally designed training leads to more diverse hiring

Abstract

Many organizations have shown interest in increasing the diversity of their workforces for various reasons. Collectively, they have spent millions of dollars and countless employee hours on diversity training. Yet, there is little empirical evidence that such training increases diversity in organizations (1, 2). Diversity training may be ineffective because it is commonly implemented in ways that are not conducive to changing behavior: It takes place far in advance of consequential decisions and tends to be generic and not specific to the behaviors that organizations may want to affect (e.g., hiring). Results of our large-scale field experiment in a global telecommunications and engineering firm show that behaviorally designed diversity training can influence hiring decisions. This training increased the short-listing of women and nonnational applicants and increased the hiring of nonnational applicants relative to business as usual. This proof of concept demonstrates that new approaches to diversity training can deliver results.