A few weeks ago, I was catching up with a friend who works for a UN agency in Bonn. Let’s call this friend Tom. Tom told me in one of his casual chats with the head of a department in the UN agency, he was asked if he could recommend a black woman to fill up a position. An internal audit was going to be done and the boss had to show he has a black woman in his team.

In an unrelated conversation in Geneva with an acquaintance whose career in the UN spans over 15 years, a similar situation ensued. She was plucked from the Nairobi office because the head of her department needed to have a black woman in her team. She is repeatedly told and given tasks on the basis of her being a symbol of the team’s diversity. Sometimes, it’s about her face being seen only but her name appears in selected places.

In both scenarios, tokenism reigns deep. It is clear that diversity alone is not enough.

A lot of organizations are now looking at how diverse and inclusive their teams are. And that is a good thing. Diversity and inclusion strategists are on hot demand and hopefully recovering all the money they didn’t make during the lockdown. However, what is the understanding companies and organizations have of racial injustices and why haven’t they been hiring black and brown talent anyway? Read on to find out what the situation is like in corporate Brussels which could very well be representative of much of continental Europe.

Grégory Luaba Déome is a consultant, recruiter, and small business owner in Brussels, Belgium. He is passionate about creating career advancement opportunities for black and brown talents. Grégory does not even for a minute shy away from having the #RaceTalk with European CEOs. He is on a mission to challenge them and support them in having more inclusive workplaces in Brussels. His business might be in the early stages but he is motivated by a deep desire to give back that has roots to his upbringing. Growing up, his parents gave up a lot with the little capital they had to make sure they invested in Grégory as a person because no one can take that away from you unlike material possessions.

Grégory drops a lot of gems for job seekers and companies in this chat. He tackles diversity and inclusion from the perspectives of both the company and black and brown candidates.

“Before I started my own business, I worked for many years for American companies in Brussels. I was the only black person in mostly white teams. The learning curve was tough. I recognized the lack of diversity but I was more interested in building my career. However, over the years and being much older now, I see it as my purpose to speak up for the younger generations. Those black and brown talents who are new in the job market who don’t see many people who look like them in senior or leadership roles and are hesitant to speak about the need for more diversity.

In the last 12 years, I’ve been discussing corporate discrimination in the labour market in Brussels. I’ve discovered a lot of companies are asking the following:

Where are the black and brown talents?

Why are they not applying for our vacancies?

What are we doing wrong with our talent acquisition model?

The default answer to some of these questions by executives is “we have 40 nationalities in our company. Ethnicity is not a problem. We mostly have a homogenous team. Racism and discrimination is not a problem.”

I decided to build a business focusing on talent management and helping companies build a diversity strategy in their hiring practices. I support companies who want to diversify their workforce by matching them with black and brown professionals. Companies provide me with the minimum requirements of candidates they are looking for and I create a database of potential candidates who can then meet the companies and then figure out if they are the right fit.

The missing link

Following the brutal killing of George Floyd, it is difficult to say if perceptions of companies towards racism and discrimination have changed. Most people are still working from home and I am still building my network of companies. However, from my own observations of Brussels or Belgium is we’re not there yet.

Most white leaders in private sector I 've spoken to, are unaware of the impact of race in their companies. Many are still uncomfortable talking about race while a few opened up and acknowledged racial discrimination in Belgian companies. For others, especially at middle-level management, it is understood as a US problem where the police are violent towards a black man. It is not seen as an existing problem in Brussels and most CEOs feel it has nothing to do with them.

The issue is simply grasped as a black man murdered by a white policeman and that is abhorrent. These leaders are not questioning at the micro level the make-up of their teams – is it only representative of the white community or are others missing? How do you establish you have a white only team? Why is it that way? How is your company playing a role in racial injustices in the professional field? While some have publicly decried racism and acknowledged there is work to be done, the connection is still missing in the minds of many European CEOs. That is where I come in. I work to connect executives to the whole narrative.

Where I have had one-on-one meetings with some CEOs, many admitted there is room for improvement. They don’t engage much with this topic and this is what is missing in corporate Brussels towards tackling racial injustice. Two of these kinds of partners have reached out saying they need support for a diversity and inclusion strategy they are putting together. I believe these companies are getting a nudge from their mother-company in the USA but all-Belgian companies are not talking about the race element yet.

Why haven’t companies in Belgium been hiring black and brown talent?

It goes both ways. Both companies and candidates have their responsibilities.

On the side of the companies, there is racism and discrimination when selecting candidates. When companies are sifting through applications, discrimination can happen based on skin colour, gender, sexual orientation, name or origin. In my observation, the criteria used by companies in hiring is skewed towards job seekers from a particular social class. In Belgium, the criteria favours whites from higher social classes with university degrees, semester abroad and internships in USA or Canada. As a result, most jobs automatically lock out applicants white and non-white who worked to pay their way through college or had to work to sustain themselves and potentially can do the work. The profiles of these other job seekers are not taken into account in the criteria of the job adverts.

Company hiring practices are another useful aspect in understanding why few or no black and brown job seekers are hired. In Brussels, many EU countries and the USA more often than not, companies recruit through employees already in their companies. They ask employees for referrals for two reasons. They trust that staff are likely to suggest a good fit and secondly it’s cheaper and faster for them instead of hiring an external company to source for the candidate. Here comes the caveat though. If the employee make-up of the company is mostly white, what are the chances the referrals will be black or brown to shift the status-quo?

On the side of the candidates, do the black and brown employees of companies also participate in referring others? Or do they feel ‘threatened’ and that they will not shine because of being the only black person in an all-white team? Unfortunately, some of people are happy to be the only black or brown employee amongst white peers in corporate spaces.

African university graduates make up the biggest migrant group in Belgium but face an unusual hurdle especially depending on where their degree was acquired. If you have a degree from Mombasa or Kinshasa, the degree does not automatically measure up to the same degree gotten in a European university. You need to go through the process of approving it as an equivalent. For many Africans, it feels like the qualifications they got from their home countries are rescinded when they’re going through the administrative process of employment. This wears a lot of candidates out.

For many black and brown folks, the repeated discrimination over a period of time becomes internalised and when we have the credentials, impostor syndrome rears its head. When opportunities present themselves, they are hesitant to go after them because they think ‘they’re not going to hire me because I am African, or I am black or brown.’ The result is there are less of us in the job market as well as the higher, more stable and better paid positions. They need to believe in themselves and go for those jobs with as much gusto and confidence.”