Inclusion and Diversity Consultant, Xcel Energy

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.