Broadcasting from the ever-glamorous Shaker Green Room at RecFest USA, Chad & Cheese sit down with the powerhouse of DEI herself, Novonda Lilly, Director of DEI Campus and Community Engagement at Vanderbilt Health. Novonda schools the guys on how to navigate the choppy waters of diversity in hiring, especially with 2025 looming large. Spoiler alert: it’s not as simple as slapping a rainbow on your LinkedIn banner.
Novonda doesn’t hold back, calling out the so-called “shortage of diverse candidates” and challenging recruiters to step up their game and actually look beyond their usual suspects. She serves up practical advice on using social media to reach underrepresented talent, though she’s quick to throw a little shade at AI and its dicey role in hiring – because, let's be real, nobody wants a “smart” robot unintentionally screening out great people. And, if you're hoping for a warm fuzzy moment, sorry – Novonda’s here to make sure we all stay sharp and resilient. She dishes on the reality of adapting DEI strategies to market trends, and she’s already lined up LinkedIn requests from everyone who wants in on her best practices.
Prepare for an episode packed with humor, hard truths, and a few digs at outdated recruiting “innovations.” Novonda reminds us that if you’re not actively building an inclusive culture, you’re setting yourself up for 2025 – and not in a good way.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION
Intro: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's Most Dangerous Podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up, boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast.
[music]
Joel: So, good morning.
Novonda Lilly: Good morning.
Joel: Who are you and why are you here?
Novonda Lilly: So, I am Novonda Lilly. I'm the director of DEI Campus and Community Engagement at Vanderbilt Health. I lead our campus recruitment team.
Chad: Very nice, right out of the gate. What advice would you have for all of your talent acquisition recruiting peers out there looking into 2025?
Novonda Lilly: I think in 2025, my advice would be to continue to focus on inclusive recruitment efforts.
Chad: Yeah.
Novonda Lilly: Also continue to focus on collaboration with your teams. Because if you're like me in healthcare recruitment, it is a challenging opportunity. And we don't always have candidates, a robust pipeline of candidates...
Chad: Yeah.
Novonda Lilly: And so you wanna make sure that you're setting a tone of encouragement for your team, but then you also have a strategic recruitment strategy that focuses on diversity inclusion. You wanna focus on ensuring that you are creating an inclusive culture for your company. And then also you wanna make sure that you focus and take time out for personal development. Because I think that you have to continue to grow and develop in your role as a leader in order to help your team and offer them opportunities for development. But also one of my things is listen to learn. Right? Listen to what your team is seeing in the market. Because oftentimes when we implement strategies, we have to adjust those strategies based off of what we're encountering in the market.
Chad: Especially now, right?
Novonda Lilly: Exactly.
Chad: Everything's moving so fast.
Novonda Lilly: It moves so fast and nobody's waiting on an offer. And if you take too long and you gotta track your metrics, understand your data so that you can improve your recruitment strategy, and you can monitor it throughout the year and you can make those critical adjustments when you need to.
Joel: Yeah. DEI has been under fire for the last couple years. Companies are abandoning it and publicly doing so. It's been politicized. It's been weaponized. I'm curious, how do you keep that North Star? How do you keep that direction even though all this noise is going on around you?
Novonda Lilly: As an organization, we've taken a position to continue to make that a priority of creating an inclusive environment. And so it should be embedded in the thread of what you do in recruitment. It doesn't have to necessarily be a carved-out strategy all the time...
Chad: Yeah.
Novonda Lilly: But if it is embedded in what you do from a daily basis and your focus is on an inclusive environment, then you can knock the noise the noise, the noise that you're hearing.
Chad: Yeah.
Novonda Lilly: Stay focused on what your goal is. It is to create an inclusive environment for your organization. So, it should be embedded in our recruitment practices. It doesn't always have to be a standalone. You don't always have to have, "Oh, we've gotta have a standalone DEI strategy."
Joel: Yeah.
Novonda Lilly: You have positions that are underrepresented and you know where you need to have that. But then there's also, 'cause there's this misperception, there's also a lack of candidate pool in some of the positions. So, you may not have a diverse candidate slate.
Chad: Yeah.
Novonda Lilly: But when you do have a diverse candidate slate, then you need to make sure that you're doing the things that you need to do to ensure that everyone feels like that they can come into an inclusive environment and be their selves every day.
Chad: What surprised you the most about what's happened thus far in 2024?
Novonda Lilly: I think that it's unfortunate, but I think that we live in a world that where there's just not a lot of surprises. You just have to figure out how do you adjust and be true to yourself.
Chad: Yeah.
Novonda Lilly: Because I think that a lot of things that happened in the media can impact the workplace and you have to be aware of that.
Chad: Yeah.
Novonda Lilly: And if COVID taught us nothing, it taught us that you've gotta be able to adjust to change quickly, and then how do you pivot from that?
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: How do you make sure that the net you're casting is as encompassing as possible? Do you use social media? What kind of job distribution are you leveraging?
Novonda Lilly: So, we pretty much... In this day of recruitment, you've gotta leverage everything. You've gotta leverage your social media platforms. So, we have our different pages. We're on LinkedIn, we are on... We do Instagram. Some people are doing like their "follow a nurse for a day." You know, different things, because what we're learning is it's ever evolving. And what you did yesterday is not gonna work tomorrow.
Joel: Yeah.
Novonda Lilly: So, you have to stay abreast of the trends. And you have to embrace technology because we are in an environment to now technology is like leading everything. Whether it is something funny or something... If it's a picture. Recruitment is recruitment, and you want people to see your authentic selves when they come into the workplace. So, we're embracing all of the different techniques and technologies, and utilizing our internal systems as well, which can be challenging sometimes. But we do have a robust recruiting strategy that addresses... And it's not a one size fits all; that's the other thing. Because you've gotta have a different recruiting strategy that you will for a nurse. And then you've gotta have a different recruiting strategy for a pharmacist or a histotech. Or if it's someone that's in compensation or in an HR position. There's not a one-size-fits-all recruiting strategy. So, you have to adjust and you have to review that strategy each time you meet with a hiring manager and have an opening, and be able to identify what are your strengths, what are your weaknesses, and what are your challenges and opportunities so that you can find the ideal candidate to fill your vacancies.
Chad: I think it's refreshing that I haven't heard AI once out of her mouth.
Joel: You just jinxed it.
Chad: Oh, I just did? Well, I have to, I have to.
[laughter]
Joel: That's the next thing out of her mouth. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Chad: I had to. And so I've gotta push that on you. What do you think, especially moving forward in 2025, are you currently using AI? Are you looking to embrace it? 'Cause you're talking about the velocity of not just tech but the landscape in itself. What do you think about that moving forward into 2025?
Novonda Lilly: So, we're utilizing AI to help our recruiters understand the capabilities that it can do for you. Like, when you have a brain freeze and you're trying to do a job description...
Chad: Yeah.
Novonda Lilly: You can go out there and you can give it. And what we're learning is that it is as much information as you can provide it, it can give you back accurate information for your pertinent situation. But when we talk about it from a recruitment and selection process, we do have some concerns. Because we wanna make sure the AI is not impacting, making an adverse impact in our candidate pool.
Chad: Yeah, bias. Yeah.
Novonda Lilly: And it has the opportunity to do that if not utilized appropriately. So, we've not embedded AI into our recruitment and selection process. We are looking at the opportunity, but we do have some reservations as it relates to AI in the recruitment and selection process.
Joel: Yeah, you're definitely not alone in those concerns, for sure. So we're here at the the RecFest Conference. The day is just starting. What are some things you're hoping to get from the conference? What are you looking for? How are you hoping to engage today?
Novonda Lilly: So, I'm actually looking forward to learning, because I do feel like that there's always some nuggets that you can take from someone else's path. Because when we think about recruitment, we all have challenges, right? And a lot of times we have the same challenges.
Chad: Yeah.
Novonda Lilly: But there's people that have implemented some things that may be helpful. We may have done some things that may be helpful to others. And I think that the more that we can share best practices or even our roadblocks, it can help us all grow in the field of recruitment. So, I'm excited to be here. I'm excited to share tomorrow on the unplugged stage. And I'm just looking to learn more from everybody that's presenting here, because I definitely feel like that there's gonna be some great nuggets that I'll be able to take back. I have a team of employees here with me today and they'll be here tomorrow. And they've been tasked with bringing back some nuggets to the team.
Chad: Yeah.
Novonda Lilly: So, our next team meeting will be lessons learned from breakfast.
Chad: Well, if somebody wants to connect with you, maybe talk to you about how you are currently doing what you do, how you can be more flexible and looking toward 2025, where can they find you?
Novonda Lilly: They can find me on LinkedIn. That would be the professional platform to connect with me.
[laughter]
Novonda Lilly: I do have an Instagram and a Facebook and all of that, but if you really... I get those type of questions all the time. I sit in the space of mentorship and coaching people all the time. So, anytime that someone reaches out to me, I'm always open to sit down, have a conversation with them and help them with their path. Because everybody's path is different. And if I can share something to help your career development, reach out to me on LinkedIn. I do post, I look at it, I respond. So, yes, definitely connect on LinkedIn.
Chad: Excellent.
Joel: Thanks for sitting down with us. Enjoy the show.
Outro: Wow. Look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast-forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt. But save some soap because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck you can't look away, and like Chad's favorite, Weston, "You can't quit them either." We out.
Comments