Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Charles Aris: A Year in Review

In the 2021 film “Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America,” narrator Jeffery Robinson describes America’s most important civil rights victories as “tipping points,” where our nation had the option to either use our momentum to keep progressing or “roll back” to the prior status quo.

Charles Aris saw the 2020 civil rights protests as an opportunity to examine our firm in relation to race and inclusion, and we created a strategic plan to address the inequities we discovered. Now, we feel as if the corporate world is also at a tipping point, where the momentum we gained in 2020 is fading in 2023, and we can either keep the ball moving or roll back.

To hold ourselves accountable and develop an ongoing plan to make our workplace safer and more diverse, equitable and inclusive for every employee, we reviewed everything we did to promote DEI in 2022 so that we can remain transparent with our partners and community and have a better idea of how to move forward.

Our metrics:

In 2020, Charles Aris created a dedicated DEI committee and webpage. We developed company goals to increase diversity among staff members and began the practice of self-reporting our current metrics for the public to view on our website. Here’s a sampling of our goals as of 2022 and where the numbers currently stand:

Goal: 

By 2025, we will have 15% racial and/or ethnic diversity in leadership and 30% racial and/or ethnic diversity firmwide.

Current standings:

Leadership:                                                    Company-wide:

Goal:

By 2025, we will have a balanced mix of gender identities in leadership and throughout the firm.

Current standings:

Leadership:

Company-wide:

How we educate ourselves:

Another pillar of our DEI mission is to educate ourselves so we can promote dialogue and understanding within our team. Here’s a snapshot of the continuing education we engaged in during 2022:

Film Screenings: We watched recent releases “Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America” (2021) and “Descendant” (2022) and used both films as a starting point to have open and honest conversations about the history of slavery and prejudice in America.

Company-wide reading: In 2022, we published a series of DEI newsletters that shared information on important civil rights holidays and histories as well as breaking news. We also read and discussed the book “White Fragility” and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

DEI resource library: Along with the news articles we shared internally via email, Charles Aris created a dedicated resource library for our employees on our intranet. This library compiled the latest DEI news and resources both inside and outside of our firm. From new legislation to student loan forgiveness, we made sure our employees had access to what’s happening in the United States at large.

Training and service: We hosted a myriad of training and discussions in 2022, including break-off groups that hosted conversations on race and gender-specific issues. We led a company training on inclusive communication, and members of our firm joined “Other Voices,” a DEI support program for the Greensboro, N.C. business community. Our employees also gave back by engaging in days of service, like hosting a booth at the Greensboro Pride Festival and helping collect donations for those in need.

Giving: Our employees give voluntary donations to a selected cause every quarter, as well as individual causes throughout the year. In 2022, we gave to the Future Fund, Women to Women, the Black Suit Initiative, the Trevor Project, Guilford Green Foundation and the Mississippi Rapid Response Coalition.

How we take our DEI mission to our clients:

As we work to make our own workplace a more diverse and welcoming environment for all, Charles Aris has the unique opportunity to do the same for our clients. While we source candidates solely on our clients’ target profiles, we hope to do so without bias towards real or perceived gender, racial or ethnic identities.

The internal conversations, education and training we’ve engaged in as a company translate into our search work. Charles Aris recruiters learn about the people they place from their character and experience, not surface-level details.

Our values and 14-step priority search process also ensure that every Charles Aris recruiter gets to know the candidates they speak with on a more personal level. We do a deep dive into our top profiles so that we learn every candidate’s ideal career path, goals, motivations and ambitions. Having meaningful conversations is one way we achieve this.

Our business functions on detailed career discussions where we seek to understand people as holistically as we can before introducing them to our clients. This allows us to see past someone’s LinkedIn profile and get to know them personally in an earnest and professional manner.

We also serve clients who share our mission to change lives, transform businesses and enrich communities. We wholeheartedly believe our clients hire us to not only elevate their organization, but also to make the world a better place by matching the best people with the most influential positions in their organizations.

Our ongoing commitment:

We’re pleased to recognize the work we’ve done throughout the past year, but we also know there is much more to do. As we continue to report our diversity metrics, we encourage all our industry partners to visit this webpage and track our progress. Our firm will also continue to educate ourselves via internal training, film screenings and other critical resources until we reach our goals and prove ourselves as true DEI champions.

In 2023, we have a robust plan to continue engaging in service work and charitable giving, and we hope that other organizations will follow our lead so that we can use our current momentum to enact real, lasting change in the business community.