Diversity isn’t just a buzz word or a new age hiring fad, it’s a proven winning strategy in hiring policy. Caesars Entertainment has been the champion of diversity in the casino industry, and Jan Jones Blackhurst, Caesars Entertainment’s Executive VP of Public Policy and Corporate Responsibility, joined our Becky Liggero to explain how they are pursuing that goal, and why others should too.
There’s a bad misconception of diversity that it means hiring quotas, and shoehorning in diverse hires that aren’t fit for their role. That’s simply not the case. “Diversity means that you have the best representation of talent throughout your organization,” Blackhurst explains. “And in order to be sure that you have the best thinkers, you’re going to have a diversely. You’re going to have people of color, women, women of color. You’re going to have representation that allows for innovation within the enterprise.”
Besides creating a business that better represents the world around it, it’s a proven boon to the bottom line. “Diversity is a best business practice,” she told Liggero. “I mean, there’s huge amounts of data that clearly say that senior teams, that are more diverse, and by diverse I mean men, women, men and women of color, different backgrounds, are higher performing. Higher revenues, higher return on revenues, higher EBIDTA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization), higher return on sale, on every metric, diverse companies are better performing companies.”
The big obstacle to this change is the white male driven history and composition in the gambling world, and the resistance it can put up. “In order to really change the composition of these organizations, I call it a managed revolution,” she said. “That means you have to be very focused on how you change how the organization looks. We hired Mackenzie, we set a standard 50/50 by 2025. That means by 2025 Caesars will have an equal representation of men, women and people of color at all levels of the organization, both horizontally and laterally. You’ll hear people say 50% of our company are women. Sure they are, they’re all managers. I want Vice Presidents, Senior Vice Presidents, C suite.”
But does that mean the quality of the hire will go down? Absolutely not. “It’s still about a meritocracy,” she noted. “What you’re ensuring, one of the first things we did was really see what our organization looked like. And in fact, we had 44% women, but when it came to Vice President it was 26%, Senior Vice President 16% and so forth. So we started looking at our recruiting, and we started to modify our recruiting practices to make sure, quite frankly, we call it fishing where the fish are. If we’re looking for talented women, talented people of color, we start making sure that we’re accessing the areas of higher learning, the business that have that talent. We bring that talent, make sure that they’re in the candidate pool.”
Caesars’ is quickly changing, but how can the rest of the industry be compelled to get on board? “I’m really hoping that Caesars’ can be a model,” Blackhurst replied. “We have 65,000 employees. We weren’t perfect, but we put in place a perfect strategy. If we can really show how you do this, document the results that in fact we are higher performing, than I think that’s a first step.”
The lack of diversity can be very obvious when visiting trade conferences, as most panels consist of white men. “I think at these conferences, we have to make sure that we have equal representation of men and women as voices on the panel,” Blackhurst declared. “You know, very often the only time you see a woman as a speaker is on a diversity panel, which means that its women talking to women. I think that at these panels, when you’re looking for presenters, you need to be very deliberate that you’re looking for talent that has a diverse background, not taking the easy voice.”
