The Current ARTS Strategies Assessment estimates the policies companies currently have for recruiting and retaining workers. The last of three evaluations introduced by PPAI’s DEI Playbook to assist member organizations in determining their DEI-based goals, ARTS—Attraction, Recruitment, Training, Sustaining—strategies are derived from numerous components of an employee’s life cycle.

The Employee Life Cycle

The employee life cycle encompasses the various stages of a person’s journey with a company, including learning about and joining the organization, as well as thriving in and separating from it. Several models of the employee life cycle exist, often ranging from four to six stages, which are listed and defined below.

Attraction: Your company’s reputation, image or brand, as perceived by employees, the local community and the market.
Recruitment: Your company’s efforts to source and recruit new talent into the organization.
Onboarding: Your company’s process for introducing new hires into the organization, orienting them to the values, goals, norms and performance expectations of the organization and their role.
Development: Your company’s continuous support of professional development to skill employees and provide career development.
Retention: Your company’s efforts to ensure top employees are satisfied and challenged.
Separation: Your company’s approach to an employee’s exit from the organization, whether voluntary or involuntary, including mitigation of disruption to remaining employees.

PPAI’s DEI Playbook focuses on four stages of the employee life cycle, which are attraction, recruitment, development, and retention. Along with each of these stages, there are four categories of interventions that an organization can implement to impact the diversity, equity, and inclusion of its workforce:

Attracting the community: Strategies for building a desirable reputation, image or brand as perceived by employees, the local community and the market.
Recruiting new employees: Strategies for recruiting diverse talent into the organization.
Training current employees: Strategies for providing your employees with appropriate and relevant training and professional development opportunities in an equitable, inclusive environment.
Sustaining current employees: Strategies for engaging your employees to foster an equitable, inclusive environment, loyalty, innovation, motivation and productivity.

Begin The Change Cycle

After a company culture with clearly defined values and objectives has been established and communicated, the focus should shift to diversity, equity, and inclusion goals. Relevant questions to ask here include “What can I do to increase diversity within the organization?” and “What can I do to foster an equitable, inclusive environment?”

PPAI’s DEI Playbook offers a process to answer these questions, shown in the diagram below. A suitable starting point involves examining your current state, then identifying one ARTS category to focus on. Next, determine a strategy to implement or change and form a plan including key performance indicators. While implementing your plan, perform regular check-ins and contemplate a time to continue to the next strategy.

Examine Your Current State

Delving deeper into the first step, start by completing a Current ARTS Strategies Assessment.

  1. For each category, identify which strategies currently exist.
  2. How does each item you list impact the organization? Is each item producing desirable results?

It can be daunting to evaluate an organization’s recruitment and retention strategies through a DEI-based lens and decide what to do with the resulting information. PPAI’s DEI Playbook provides comprehensive guidance for determining and implementing ARTS strategies beginning on page 27. There is also relevant on-demand educational content available. Click here for previous and future PPAI education sessions focusing on various DEI-based concepts. For questions about any of the available PPAI resources in this area, contact diversity@PPAI.org.