Diversity and inclusion, one might say, are the nuts and bolts of The Home Depot operation.

“Our core values are around respecting all people,” says Angie Goldsmith, The Home Depot’s divisional retail staffing manager. “Our service model deals with mirroring the communities that we work in. Our leadership competencies include creating inclusion. So it’s part of the fabric of our organization: to be diverse and to reach out to diverse applicants.”

Like many retailers, their “reach” stretches right across Canada. In The Home Depot’s case, that adds up to 155 stores and 27,000 associates. But unlike most retailers, it has an HR manager in every one of its stores. Trevor Lovig, The Home Depot’s talent manager, calls it a “centralized process” where head office is “the toolkit provider, the empowerment, the educator, rather than the one that’s the catalyst.”

This is where Goldsmith comes in. Her job is to provide those HR managers—who she refers to as her “internal client group”—with the tools and the direction “to serve the customer better and to reflect their communities better.”
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“If my mandate is to enable and enhance the capability of our organizations to recruit a diverse and talented workforce,” she says. “Then that’s what I do. Help them achieve that goal.”

Right now The Home Depot is gearing up for its spring hiring season and is planning to hire approximately 7,000 new associates for its stores across the country. A large number of those new employees will be older workers, thanks to CARP, Canada’s Association for the Fifty-Plus, with whom the home improvement giant has an exclusive hiring partnership.

“The Home Depot sees this demographic as an experienced, highly dedicated workforce. In fact, almost 20 percent of our workforce is currently represented by associates aged 50 and older,” Bernard Cormier, vice president of human resources, announced. “We also feel it’s important that our associate base reflects the diverse communities where we operate. We celebrate and respect the different strengths and talents of our associates, as they provide our team with a greater ability to serve our customers well,”

Lovig’s job is to roll out the major HR processes—finding where the talent in the organization is, identifying who the diversity champions are.

“When you look at the changing face of Canada, we have to be leaders when it comes to diversity and inclusion. Because if we’re not, we’re not going to hire the best people, and we’re not going to be able to serve our customers as well as possible,” he says. “And we take great pride in the fact that we think we’re ahead of the curve.”

Goldsmith is determined to stay there by recruiting what she sees as the fastest growing segments of the labour force: mature workers, aboriginal youth and new immigrants.

“It makes sense if we’re going to stay ahead of the curve in terms of numbers and the diversity of people that we need, that we take advantage of growing segments of the workforce,” she says. “And recognize that they’re also diverse segments of the workforce.”