Diverse and bold recruitment

Linda Mouaz shares her experience and simple, yet essential practical tips in building and leading a diverse and inclusive in-house legal team.

I have a cosmopolitan legal team comprising of the nationalities Indian, Filipino, Egyptian, Iranian, and very soon, a Saudi national. I am a French national. Within the team, we are three men and three women. Some people may look at the composition of my legal team and view the diversity as a problem, on the contrary, I see the difference as an opportunity.

When I started recruiting to rebuild the legal team, I was sure of one thing: as I chose to live in Dubai – a cosmopolitan environment – I should be able to interview candidates from different cultures and backgrounds. I was thrilled!

Where and how you grow up greatly impacts your definition of difference. When talking about respect of diversity, you need to be aware of your own biases, preferences and preconceived notions. It is normal to have biases and personal filters. They are mostly unconscious and unintentional. We all tend to subconsciously recruit people who are similar to us, which generally leads to monotonous teams. We know that we treat some people differently from others and the reason is that we are hardwired to do that. We prefer people who are, and act like us. But the question is,  does your legal team really need more people like you?

Luckily for my legal team, I did not receive resumes of French legal candidates which matched the profiles I was looking for. This pushed me to go beyond my biases and consider profiles that were very different from mine.

As a team leader looking to hire, you tend to make an initial judgment about a candidate (based on information in their CV, their appearance, etc.) and then, pay attention to evidence that supports this initial judgment, overlooking evidence that challenges it. Unconscious bias can affect your ability to make objective decisions. It can cause you to over-estimate the abilities of some candidates, and under-estimate the abilities of others, meaning that you can miss talent or give positions to individuals who are not best-suited for the role. We all tend to compare candidates against each other rather than against the job requirements.

You can have a diverse legal team but without being inclusive i.e. without valuing and leveraging on the differences in people and cultures, it is unlikely to reach its full potential. Inclusion is what makes diversity truly work.

Diverse and inclusive teams perform better when they are well-managed and led. When you manage people across geographies and cultures, your team has an incredibly wide range of experiences. This can be extremely powerful to support you in achieving your strategic targets. By recruiting legal people with different skills and backgrounds, you can create a strong team of individuals who complement each other.

I have listed below a few practical tips which have been helpful for me when approaching the recruitment of legal professionals:

• Set focused recruitment criteria: be very clear on the competencies you are assessing which should be fully-aligned with the requirements of the role.
• Know your own biases: think about what biases might influence you. Some might be easier to identify, others may be less obvious.
• Create the right environment to make the interviews as effective as possible. Have you turned off your phone? Do you have a quiet room and enough time to write-up your notes? Do you have a bottle of water with you? These actions have allowed me and might allow you to be fully focused during the interview, maximising your accuracy and reducing the chance of bias.
• Involve the existing members of your legal team in the hiring process of their future colleagues. This will help reducing the impact of the ‘similar-to-you effect’ and give your team members a different perspective (and sometimes less insecurity) about their future legal colleagues.

Columnist: Linda Mouaz, legal manager & compliance officer – Nestlé Middle East FZE