How a diversity initiative changed course over time

Three years ago, dozens of major companies formed a coalition and declared an ambitious goal: move one million Black workers into high-paying jobs by hiring or promoting them over the next decade.

The resulting nonprofit organization, A tenwas founded amid a crescendo of calls to address racial injustice following the 2020 killing of George Floyd. It asked its members – including AT&T, Bank of America, Cisco, Delta Air Lines, Dow, General Motors, Nike and Walmart – to pledge to hire and promote black workers based on skills rather than college degrees.

Fast forward, and the social climate has changed dramatically since then. Encouraging black-only recruitment programs has become increasingly controversial, especially in the wake of last year's Supreme Court ruling against race-based affirmative action policies at colleges.

OneTen, which has fallen far behind the pace needed to reach its original goal, is at the forefront of a movement to adopt practices for diversity, equality and inclusion in business. And it has been forced to change with the times.

The organization has adjusted its messaging over the past year, especially since the Supreme Court ruling, to emphasize that the policies it advocates will help “black talent and others.”

More concretely, the organization's leaders realized that asking companies to promise to make changes wasn't enough. OneTen has helped its members rewrite job descriptions for hundreds of positions to remove unnecessary degree requirements and clearly identify the skills sought and needed. The organization has helped design apprenticeship programs for companies like Delta and the Cleveland Clinic, tailored to different fields. And it has created a network where HR and hiring managers can share their challenges and propose solutions, in virtual and in-person sessions.

OneTen also works to build connections between employers, training programs and employees.

“The beginning was difficult – we learned lessons,” said Kenneth Frazier, founder and chairman of OneTen and former CEO of Merck. “But we still have the ambition to make a big difference.”

Many companies are rethinking their diversity efforts after the Supreme Court ruling, and states like Florida and Texas have passed laws to curtail DEI policies. Lawsuits have been filed threatening companies a fund in Atlanta focused on supporting black female entrepreneurs.

Recent research shows a retreat from practices such as requiring diverse candidate pools at job interviews to fill vacancies. And the resignation of Claudine Gay, a Black woman, as president of Harvard has been celebrated by opponents of DEI initiatives in academia and business, who claimed she was a diversity asset.

Pfizer and two law firms, Morrison Foerster and Perkins Coie, opened their diversity fairs to students of all races last year after lawsuits were filed against them alleging racial discrimination.

“There is diversity fatigue,” says Debbie Dyson, CEO of OneTen. “What we do cannot be: 'This is a diversity issue.' Skills give you an alternative path.”

OneTen, whose founders included prominent black business leaders such as Mr. Frazier and Kenneth Chenault, former CEO of American Express, promoted skills-based hiring from its inception. More than 60 percent of all American workers According to the Census Bureau, they do not have a four-year college degree. But requiring a degree on job applications hits minorities especially hard, eliminating 72 percent of black adults, for example.

Adopting skills-based practices can help companies tap into these skills, according to workforce experts a broader pool of high-performing, dedicated employees, while increasing career opportunities and household income for millions of Americans. One study estimated that up to 30 million workers without a four-year college degree have the most skills to succeed in better jobs and pay 70 percent more.

OneTen started with a “super aggressive” goal and a diversity message, says Plinio Ayala, CEO of Per Scholas, a nonprofit vocational training program. The shift to emphasizing skills, he said, “makes much more sense and is gaining momentum.”

OneTen's collaboration with Delta is an example of the organization's revised approach.

Following the OneTen playbook, the airline has removed the four-year degree requirement from 94 percent of its job postings, including for pilot positions. Previously, about half of Delta jobs required a college degree.

The company initially heard internal criticism that OneTen was only for black employees. But like OneTen itself, Delta has emphasized that skills-based hiring and promotion can benefit all employees.

“What's been really helpful is equality for all, and we're really leaning into that message of equality for all,” said Joanne Smith, Chief People Officer at Delta.

OneTen has also helped the airline create an apprenticeship program designed to move hourly employees into gainful employment with a career path that typically pays at least $60,000 per year.

The one-year apprenticeships include classroom and on-the-job training, mentoring and support services. Graduates are assured of a job. The program, which started in 2021 as an experiment with six employees, had grown last year to a group of 56, who were selected from 7,000 applicants.

Sanassa Diane was part of that group. She started at Delta in 2018 in a call center. “When you called the 1-800 number, I was the person on the other end of the line,” she said.

Ms. Diane, 28, rose through the call center hierarchy to become a customer service representative for an invitation-only service primarily for Delta's most lucrative frequent flyers, although she was still paid hourly.

Just over a year ago, Ms. Diane entered the internship program and landed a salaried position in the company's sales department, arranging contracts and deals for Delta's corporate clients. Her wages increased by more than 50 percent.

The transition was intimidating at first, she recalled, and she had “impostor syndrome,” a feeling of not belonging in a work environment. Delta arranged for an external workplace coaching company to help her manage the anxiety.

“Entering the business world can be challenging or scary if you're not used to it,” she said.

Ms. Diane, who has dropped out of college, is taking courses for a bachelor's degree in technology and management and plans to work her way up the corporate ladder at Delta.

Despite Delta's embrace of skills-based hiring, the approach still needs to take off more broadly. In a OneTen survey Last year, 56 percent of 500 hiring managers said eliminating four-year degree requirements would improve their hiring practices, but only 31 percent do so.

These numbers highlight the gap between recognizing a problem and changing corporate behavior, said Ginni Rometty, chairman of OneTen and former CEO of IBM. “That requires a culture change,” she says. “And it takes time.”

As OneTen has refined its approach, it is making progress, but it is still far behind the million jobs in ten years pace set in its name. So far, the coalition of companies has notified 108,000 people who meet the OneTen definition: Black workers without a four-year college degree hired or promoted to jobs that pay family-sustaining wages, as measured by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's living wage calculator.

In 30 percent of the allotted time, OneTen has achieved approximately 10 percent of its goal, even as the number of affiliated employers has almost doubled to 65 companies.

Mr. Chenault, the former American Express chief, is now a director of General Catalyst, a venture capital firm. He compares OneTen to “a start-up that is in year 3.” It started with one focus, then saw a bigger opportunity and pivoted.

“Yes, we are targeting African Americans, but there is a broader opportunity,” he said. “If a company is going to adopt skills-first practices, they will do it for everyone.”

OneTen's expansion plans include working with community colleges as a source of talent and with military bases as major civilian employers. But OneTen already estimates that income gains for the more than 100,000 Black workers its coalition partners have hired or promoted will amount to $12 billion.

Demographic trends can also help employers change. The American workforce is aging, shrinking and becoming more diverse. Millions of jobs remain unfilled due to a lack of skilled workers.

“There is a fundamental business reason for companies to move to a skills-based hiring system, in addition to all the social justice issues that got us off the ground,” said Mr. Frazier, OneTen's chairman.