Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: Building a Diverse WorkforceCornell

Certificate Program

Your talent pool represents all of the potential candidates you can hire for a job. As the first step of the hiring process, it is the first critical indicator of whether your hiring process is inclusive. A diverse talent pool is one that encompasses the many potential candidates on the market who could successfully apply for a particular role at your organization and mitigates areas of bias that often prevent marginalized candidates from joining and staying in the talent pool. Without a diverse talent pool, you cannot interview a diverse array of candidates and hire those candidates to create a more inclusive and representative workforce. By eliminating bias in the hiring process, your organization can build a diverse talent pool and create the foundation for inclusion, from recruitment all the way through to retention and success.

In this course, you will establish what diversity and inclusion mean in relation to the hiring process and specifically how they connect to building diverse talent pools. You'll also evaluate your organization's sourcing methods for opportunities to establish more inclusive talent pipelines. You will then enhance your company's messaging to attract a diverse array of candidates and address sources of bias in the initial screening processes that your organization uses for early-stage job candidates. Finally, you'll explore different methods for measuring the effectiveness of your inclusion-based recruitment strategies. These methods will help you create an inclusion-centered approach to hiring that will broaden your talent pool and create more opportunities for your organization to hire candidates of marginalized identities and experiences.

It is strongly encouraged for students to take this course first, unless they have a strong amount of hiring and DEI experience.

Candidate evaluation is the second stage of the hiring process. The evaluation stage allows your organization to determine which candidates from your diverse talent pool are the most qualified to meet the needs of an open position. During candidate evaluation, every step, from reviewing résumés to conducting interviews and making selection decisions, offers an opportunity for inclusion. Yet each step within this stage of the hiring process also has pitfalls that can result in candidates of marginalized identities being excluded and impacting your organization's long-term inclusion goals.

In this course, you will begin by examining how the candidate evaluation stage fits within an inclusive hiring approach, including the power of decision making in candidate selection. You will explore best practices for early-stage candidate evaluations and for interviewing candidates, and you'll evaluate the potential challenges of common approaches like pre-interview assessments and interviewing for “fit.” You can use these best practices to make inclusive selection decisions that reduce bias and emphasize equity in candidate selection.

You are required to have completed the following courses or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Building Diverse Talent Pools

The hiring process does not stop at making a job offer. Onboarding and retention that lead to employee success make up the final stage of an inclusive hiring process. When you hire a new candidate, that candidate will be integrated within your organization through onboarding and hopefully grow over their time of employment. Candidates from marginalized backgrounds do not want to enter a new organization only to feel excluded immediately upon onboarding or to find themselves unable to advance. By providing candidates with inclusive onboarding measures and equitable, proactive opportunities for growth, you can maintain inclusion both within your hiring practices and within your organization as a whole.

In this course, you will begin by reviewing the concept of employee integration and how it is impacted by onboarding and cultural inclusion. You will then determine the value of making inclusive offers to your candidates, including what equitable benefits and negotiation practices look like. You'll explore how to build an inclusive onboarding experience as well as how to sustain an employee's success beyond onboarding through internal hiring practices. Finally, you will revisit methods of tracking and monitoring DEI and inclusion progress over time to ensure that your organization recognizes the tangible benefits of an inclusive approach to hiring.

You are required to have completed the following courses or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Building Diverse Talent Pools
• Adopting Inclusive Hiring Practices

There is no such thing as a workplace that lacks diversity. Despite decades of legal and social reform aimed at reducing discrimination in the workplace, inequality continues to be a significant problem in all societies and most workplaces.

In this course, you will identify the perceptual and psychological processes that impact the way that individuals interact with people who are demographically dissimilar from them. You will examine the psychological processes that impact decision making within organizations and identify how professionals can design better work practices and help to more effectively leverage the potential among employees.

As a trained psychologist with research and consulting expertise related to diversity and inclusion, Cornell University Professor Lisa Nishii is uniquely positioned to help course participants understand the complex dynamics underlying diversity challenges and opportunities within organizations.

Symposium sessions feature three days of live, highly interactive virtual Zoom sessions to explore today’s most pressing topics. The Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Symposium offers you a unique opportunity to engage in real-time conversations with peers and experts from the Cornell community and beyond. Using the context of your own experiences, you will take part in reflections and small-group discussions to build on the skills and knowledge you have gained from your courses.

Join us for the next Symposium! From the workplace to our homes, discussions about diversity and inclusion are necessary to become aware of our biases and promote action and change. Throughout this Symposium, you will examine and dissect key diversity and inclusion topics like psychological safety, belonging, and equity. By participating in dynamic and relevant dialogues, you will discover a variety of perspectives and create genuine connections with participants from diverse industries and backgrounds.

Upcoming Symposium: January 2025 

All sessions are held on Zoom.

You may participate in as many sessions as you wish. Attending Symposium sessions is not required to successfully complete the certificate program. Once enrolled in your courses, you will receive information about upcoming events. Accessibility accommodations will be available upon request.