Recruiting and Retaining LGBTQ+ Folks with Matthew French

In this episode of Reimagining Company Culture, we spoke with Matthew French, founder of Awesomely Authentic and Assistant Director for Employer Relations at UNC Charlotte. Matthew has spent ten years working at the intersection of DEI and career services, and he brings a practitioner's lens to one of the most widely discussed and poorly executed parts of modern DEI work: recruiting and retaining LGBTQ+ employees.

What made Matthew's take useful was how little he cared about the surface-level signals. The rainbow logo in June, the ERG brochure, the corporate statement. Those things matter, but only as artifacts of a deeper commitment. His focus was on the everyday experience that shapes whether an LGBTQ+ candidate chooses to join and whether the employee decides to stay.

What LGBTQ+ Recruiting and Retention Actually Requires

Recruiting LGBTQ+ employees starts before the candidate ever sees a job description. It depends on whether your benefits, policies, and manager training can credibly support an LGBTQ+ employee's life, whether your retention data shows you are holding onto the LGBTQ+ people you already have, and whether your ER function handles concerns consistently when they come up.

McKinsey's LGBTQ+ workplace research shows that LGBTQ+ women are twice as likely as women overall to report being the only person like them in a room, and 46 percent of LGBTQ+ employees are not out to everyone at work. Trans employees report thinking about leaving their jobs at higher rates than cisgender peers. These are not soft problems. They are retention problems with measurable cost.

Additional data from the Human Rights Campaign on workplace equality underscores why this matters across industries. Companies with transparent LGBTQ+ inclusive policies and practices show meaningfully higher average net income than peers with less mature programs. The retention and engagement effects translate directly into financial performance, which is why the investment case is increasingly defended on business grounds rather than values grounds alone.

How LGBTQ+ Recruiting and Retention Shows Up in Practice

What do LGBTQ+ candidates actually look for?

Benefits that cover partners and chosen family, healthcare that includes gender-affirming care, policies that protect employees in every jurisdiction the company operates in, and visible leadership who have a track record on inclusion. Candidates also look at employer review sites for signals that the advertised culture matches the lived one.

How does retention fail LGBTQ+ employees?

Most often through accumulation of small moments that a generic DEI program does not address. Manager comments, exclusion from informal networks, healthcare friction, and ER cases that feel like they went sideways. Retention fails before the person resigns, usually by about nine to twelve months.

Matthew also talked about the recruiting funnel specifically. LGBTQ+ candidates often self-select out of employers whose public signals do not match their lived experience. That silent filtering means the talent pool looks smaller than it actually is. Companies that invest in visibility and in the underlying policies frequently see a larger, more qualified candidate set within one to two recruiting cycles.

The flip side is that unsubstantiated visibility accelerates attrition. A candidate who joined because of the external signal and encountered an inconsistent internal reality tends to leave faster than an employee who joined with modest expectations and saw the company deliver.

What Actually Works for LGBTQ+ Recruiting and Retention

Principle 1: Fix the benefits design first

Benefits are the most concrete signal of commitment. Partner coverage, gender-affirming care, family-building benefits that do not assume a specific family structure, and clear mental health support all matter. Candidates can tell within a benefits summary whether the company has thought about their lives.

Principle 2: Train managers for the small moments

Most retention risk is in everyday interactions, not in policy documents. Manager coaching on pronouns, on handling disclosure, and on responding to microaggressions is where the retention lift is.

Principle 3: Use case data to catch patterns early

A strong HR case management platform lets DEI and ER leaders see whether LGBTQ+ employees are raising concerns at disproportionate rates or whether cases cluster around specific managers. Without that visibility, problems stay individual when they are actually systemic.

For HR leaders working in multi-jurisdictional environments, the protected class definitions also vary. Programs that assume a single definition across every market end up with gaps in both coverage and communication. A quick jurisdictional review every year is a modest investment that avoids bigger problems later.

Where Employee Relations Fits

LGBTQ+ retention frequently hinges on the ER function. Employees experiencing discrimination, exclusion, or retaliation need a credible path that handles their concern with consistency and privacy. Teams using a defined ER operating model and structured case workflows are much more likely to retain employees who raise a concern, because the resolution is visible and predictable.

ER drill-down: case pattern analysis for LGBTQ+ employees

Where privacy allows, segment case data to watch for three patterns. Whether case rates are proportional to population share. Whether time to resolution differs from the overall population. Whether the same managers appear across multiple reports. Each of these signals a fixable problem if the organization is willing to see it.

Privacy is non-negotiable in this analysis. Use aggregate patterns rather than individual drill-downs, and involve legal and privacy partners in the design.

Frequently Asked Questions About LGBTQ+ Recruiting and Retention

Are ERGs enough for LGBTQ+ retention?No. ERGs create community and surface issues, but retention requires benefits, policy, and manager behavior to match. Treating the ERG as the full program puts unfair pressure on a volunteer group of employees.

How do you measure LGBTQ+ retention when data is limited?Self-identification is voluntary and often low in the first year of a new collection program. Pair the quantitative signal with qualitative data from stay interviews, ERG input, and ER case patterns. The combination is more reliable than any single source.

What about industries or regions where visibility is legally risky?Design for safety first. In jurisdictions with legal exposure, the priority is protecting employees, not promoting visibility. Local legal counsel and local ERG leadership should drive the approach in those markets.

How do you respond to backlash against LGBTQ+ inclusion work?Stay focused on employee experience and business outcomes. Organizations that tie LGBTQ+ inclusion to concrete metrics like retention and engagement tend to hold their ground more easily than organizations that rely exclusively on external branding.

Does LGBTQ+ retention improve if the CEO is visible on the topic?It helps, but middle managers are the bigger variable. Employees experience the company through their manager every day and through the CEO only occasionally. CEO visibility paired with manager capability produces results. CEO visibility alone does not.

The Bottom Line for HR Leaders

Matthew's message is that LGBTQ+ recruiting and retention is a test of whether a company's broader DEI practice is real. The benefits, the policies, the manager training, the ER handling, and the visible leadership all have to hold together. Gaps in any one of them show up first in the LGBTQ+ retention data, because the margins are thinner and the stakes are higher.

HR leaders who invest seriously in the practical layer, not just the branding, produce measurable results. The ones who stop at the rainbow logo usually see the attrition data tell them the truth. The good news is that the work is well understood, and the research is clear about what holds up. What remains is execution.

That execution is boring, steady, and cumulative. It is also what separates companies where LGBTQ+ employees genuinely thrive from companies that talk about it well.

See how AllVoices helps HR teams turn inclusion commitments into day-to-day operational reality.