GROW Talent Analytics is a software platform in development designed to minimize the negative impact of affinity bias on professional services firms’ efforts to achieve diversity, equity, and inclusion objectives.

GROW implements objective standards within talent management practices to establish a level playing field for a firm’s professionals regardless of their diverse characteristics (color, gender, religion, sexual preference, among others). The platform also provides the firm a mechanism to demonstrate to all stakeholders that the firm operates in a manner that maximizes equity and inclusion for all personnel. GROW will initially be built for law firms and attorneys before expanding to other professional services verticals such as consulting, banking, and accounting.

Affinity Bias refers to the conscious or subconscious preference of individuals (partners in the law firm context) for people like themselves in terms of appearance, background, and beliefs. Left unchecked, in a firm where partners tend to be of a particular homogeneous background, those partners tend to hire, staff, coach and promote people of the same backgrounds making futile otherwise conscious efforts to achieve diversity. GROW offers law firms a way to minimize affinity bias from the talent development process and to apply objective standards wherever possible in a low-touch, user-friendly way.

Initially, the GROW platform, built with AI-based data analytics and automation technology will enable law firms to:

• build automated, robust, real time expertise and relationship profiles of its attorneys based on internal and external data;
• Enable partners to staff attorneys on engagements based on that expertise;
• collect and analyze real time objective data to assess associate performance; and
• provide a user-friendly performance review system that ensures that appraisals and promotions are conducted uniformly across the firm based on metrics standardized across geographies and normalized for partner idiosyncrasies or varying personal standards.

Data illustrations (social graph methodologies) and metrics dashboards will be applied to achieve a gamification effect that ensures user persistent engagement.

The longer-term development plan includes modules relating to compensation, recruitment, and business development. In addition, GROW seeks to empower professionals by giving them access and ownership of their own profiles.

GROW is an acronym for Goal-setting, Review, & Opportunities @ Work.