The right diversity, equity, and inclusion fit for your success

Diversity makes businesses more successful. Most business owners and managers know that. But simply making diversity, equity, and inclusion — or DEI – a goal or priority doesn’t magically make it so. Building a diverse organization takes specific skills, experience, and tools. Your executives, and the partner you choose to help find them are an effective place to start.

Durakis Executive Search has long prided ourselves on helping our clients find homerun candidates from untapped candidate pools. As our industry developed special tools and techniques to focus on different aspects of DEI, we crafted our process to ensure that we have always offered the best options to our clients. We do this for DEI needs by focusing on three specific areas:

1. Specialized credentials and experience

Our firm holds a Certified Diversity Sourcing Certification from SourcingCertification.com, a leading global Sourcing Training and Certification Program for Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Professionals. This allows us to tailor every search to meet your specific needs and accounts for the latest in diversity and inclusion practices.

2. Customizing the search parameters for your DEI needs

Every company approaches DEI hiring differently. And each search may have its own needs. That’s why we begin with a DEI discovery and planning to help us customize your search by understanding:

• Your current demographic makeup and gaps you need to cover; and
• Specific compliance mandates or goals of your organization.

Requirements can go beyond indicators like age, race, or gender. Organizations must sometimes consider such as innate and acquired diversity indicators as nationality, religion, gender identity, age, sexual orientation, race or ethnicity, socio-economic background, veteran status , language and cultural fluency, global experience and basis of disability – not to mention any other federal, state, or local protected class.

A deep understanding of your needs and objectives allows our research specialists to efficiently target specific search parameters for your search.

3. Leveraging specialized sources and techniques

With custom DEI search parameters in place, we use a broad range of methodologies and tactics cultivated over the years. These allow us to execute a search using special sources and techniques that a standard search or standard search skills match can’t.

This art and science approach includes many technical and intuitive techniques.

• Identifying diversity indicators — filters and search terms to identify talent pools known to target specific demographics — like;
  • Similar job titles;
  • Certification, licenses, degrees;
  • Target diversity schools; and
  • Association and conferences targeting diversity specifications.

• Targeted search engines and datasets, like;
  • Leveraging the strengths of each platform’s unique data for culling search results (e.g., LinkedIn for professional experience, etc.);
  • Carefully-crafted searches with advanced logic and operators, also known as X-Ray searching; and
  • Reverse image searches to cross-reference potential candidates’ unlisted online information.

• Experience and understanding of where to look, like;
  • Target companies to include (or avoid) based on historical DEI population;
  • Member associations, organizations, or conferences; and
  • Particular colleges and universities, or training keywords.

All of this with one end goal in mind – your success

While no two searches are exactly the same, from their requirements to their outcome, our long history in specialized search, and our ability to develop and execute a custom search plan has proven to be very valuable to clients with DEI needs. Of course, a diverse, equitable, and inclusive team is an objective of many organizations. But those that go the extra mile and implement DEI strategies (or work with partners for whom DEI is a specific focus) are the ones that see the greatest benefits.