-: All right, so my name's Jim Houston,
I'm an inclusion and diversity consultant with Xcel Energy.
What my job is to do is focus on workforce development,
so I partner with nonprofits, student organizations,
professional organizations,
and try to make those connections with our hiring leaders
so that they can build out more diverse candidate pools.
And then internally I work with our hiring leaders
to talk about their job descriptions,
talk about how they're attracting employers
or candidates to their positions.
So if we're looking to be more diverse,
and someone isn't familiar with Xcel Energy
or they don't see themselves as working at Xcel Energy,
I have conversations with those leaders about
how to talk about their positions, how to attract people
that may not ever consider working at Xcel.
And not that it's a problem, but it's just one
of those issues that we gotta solve in this space is like,
how to attract people who had never thought about us before.
One of the things I do with nonprofit partners
that have training programs.
I'll have hiring leaders review those trainings,
and see if those qualifications will allow somebody
to do the work.
And so if someone does like a construction skills training
or like a customer service training,
it may not match up well with our job description.
But if hiring leaders can say, "okay,
if someone's at 16 weeks of customer service training,
they can do this work."
Now we go back to our HR business partners and say,
"Can we call out these trainings?
Can we change the job description
in a way that shows people who are going
to these programs that they actually would qualify?"
And right now in a lot of situations, it just says,
two years of experience and someone who, again,
someone who's never thought of Xcel energy
as an employer wouldn't necessarily see themselves fitting
unless it got called out specifically.
And so that's some of the work I try to do with them,
just to think more about people that aren't applying,
and what kind of language we can use,
and how can discuss our roles
so people will actually see themselves
as a part of the company before they start.