It’s not a secret that a diverse team has a lot of benefits for a company. They help make an organization more creative and innovative, resulting in better overall results. You need to have a good diversity recruiting strategy to achieve these benefits.
But, what exactly are the fundamentals of a diversity recruiting strategy, and how can it be improved? Find out here.
What is a Diversity Recruiting Strategy?
A diversity recruiting strategy relates to the idea that your team should reflect the society around you. At the same time, it also means that your recruitment policies must be free from bias against or for any groups of candidates or individuals.
When people think of diversity, they automatically relate it to multiculturalism. However, diversity recruitment is more about creating an assortment of workforce with different attributes such as race, gender, age, educational background, among many other things.
However, building a diverse workforce is easier said than done. Remember, the idea of diversity exists mainly because there are conflicting perspectives. This means that a diverse workforce will also deal with conflicts in other ways.
The Importance
Why is a diversity recruiting strategy important in the first place? It is because of the following reasons:
It Can Boost Creativity
A diverse workforce is much more creative than other types of workforce. This is mainly because of each individual’s different perspectives and experiences, allowing them to develop new and fresher ideas.
It Can Help Establish Diverse Perspective
A diverse workforce has plenty of different access points for a wider perspective since each individual has different characteristics, skills, and backgrounds. This can be extremely beneficial for companies, especially when it comes to planning and implementing business strategies.
Build Greater Innovation
According to research, a more inclusive company is 1.7x more likely to be one of the innovation leaders in their industry. This is because, most of the time, combining employees’ different perspectives and worldviews will help open doors for more innovations.
Increase Productivity and Maximize Profits
A diverse pool of workforce with different abilities, skills, and talents can have a more positive impact on a business. At the same time, research also shows that the cash flows of diverse companies are 2.3x higher compared to companies with monolithic staff.
Reduce Employee Turnover Rates
A diverse company is more likely to be inclusive of each employee’s different perspectives and characteristics. As a result, employees are more likely to have a better sense of belonging in their workplace, reducing turnover rates.
Encourage Better Employee Engagement
Just like with turnover rates, employee engagement can also significantly improve with a more diverse workforce because their principles are highly similar. Having more people who share knowledge and experiences of being considered unconventional, the less likely it becomes an issue.
Tips on How to Improve Diversity Recruitment Strategy
The idea behind a diversity recruiting strategy might sound simple and easy to do. However, that is far from the truth since most diverse recruitment strategies nowadays are only scratching the surface.
With this in mind, here are some tips that will help improve your diversity recruitment strategy:
Integrate Diversity in Your Sourcing
One of the best ways to ensure that you are hiring a diverse group of people is to make sure that diversity is present in your pool of applicants. You can do this by using the following:
● Re-evaluate Your Job Ads
Take a look at your previous ads and see whether it has helped you recruit diverse candidates. With the evaluation results, you can make changes to be able to recruit a wider range of candidates.
You might notice that you used languages that are more attractive to specific demographics in your past job abs. If this is the case, you need to use more inclusive language that appeals to candidates from different walks of life.
● Focusing on Where Diverse Candidates Congregate
Another way to improve the diversity in your pool of candidates is by sourcing them from different places. Don’t just rely on the same avenues when looking for new candidates because doing this can result in a similar pool of candidates that lacks diversity.
You can try to source diverse candidates on where they hang out. For example, there are many online and offline platforms that focus on women in science. Pursuing this source will allow you to get an opportunity to get in touch with high-caliber female candidates instead of waiting around for them to reach you.
There are many other ways of diversifying your recruitment sources. But just remember; the more diverse recruitment sources you have, the more diverse the pool of candidates you will have as well.
Encourage Referrals from Your Existing Staff
There is a high chance that your employees have a network of people who share the same background. This is why candidate referral programs can be an opportunity to maximize your diversity recruiting strategy. At the same time, it can help you highlight that your company welcomes diverse ideas and backgrounds.
If you are planning on adding a specific employee from a particular demographic, it would be best to reach out to your employee who is also part of that group. You can encourage them to share your job ads with their group of friends. Not only will this help you come up with a more diverse candidate pool but also make your employee and the candidate feel that your company values their presence and opinion, which can be very positive for your engagement and overall team morale.
Offer Internship Programs to Targeted Groups
You may have noticed that there’s an increasing number of companies that are offering internship programs to specific candidates from particular demographics. This is mostly because it’s an excellent way of encouraging up-and-coming candidates within your industry to gain more experience and join your team.
There are several ways for you to accomplish this. A good diversity recruiting strategy is to reach out to community groups or universities in your area so that you can connect with students. Most of the time, communities already have their own programs that encourage youth development which you can team up with. You can consider it as giving back to your community while getting access to fresh and diverse talents.
Create Diversity and Inclusivity Policies
Promoting diversity is one thing, but integrating it into your daily values when recruiting is another thing that is quite challenging to do. This is why it is crucial to implement diversity and inclusivity policies in your company.
For example, these policies could be about religious holidays. You can give them a flexible work schedule during these days so that they can celebrate it while still continuing working.
But remember that it can be super easy to be caught up in your personal biases even if you have good intentions. This is why it will help a lot if you encourage your employees to speak up if they notice company policies that do not align with diversity and inclusivity.
By the end of the day, if you want to include diversity in your diversity recruiting strategy, it should start within the company’s foundation, which is its policies.
Use Blind Resume and Interview
Using blind resumes and interviews is becoming more popular among recruiters who want to remove biases in screening candidates.
For blind resumes, recruiters block out the personal information of the candidates. This information includes their names, birth dates, schools, genders, location, and any other information that can result in biased assessment even if it is not consciously done.
On the other hand, blind interviews have the same principles as blind resumes. This technique can be done by sending candidates text-based questions. The candidates answer these questions anonymously, and they are instructed not to include personal information. However, this is best done in the early stages of recruitment.
The main idea with blind interviews is to eliminate bias when deciding who the candidates will be given a chance to be interviewed further. Naturally, it’s difficult to remove bias and the personality of the candidate during phone or face-to-face interviews, which is why it is most effective in the early stages of recruitment, using a text-based approach.
Rethink the Your Screening Factors
This tip can be tied back to re-evaluating your job ads. A crucial aspect of a diversity recruiting strategy is to continuously question what traits you value the most in candidates and the reason behind that. You also need to think about whether these answers are coming from your own bias or not, which is why you need to take time and rethink your screening factors.
Look back to your previous methods of testing screening candidates. Honestly, ask yourself if you are going on the path of diversity or not. If the answer is yes, you can continue what you are doing. If not, it is best to ask your colleagues’ opinions to confirm your suspicions and address them accordingly.
Offer Opportunities
Offering solutions that can help improve or widen the candidate selection is crucial in creating a better diversity recruiting strategy. This means that providing a variety of opportunities can also help attract a more diverse workforce.
Some of the opportunities that you might want to consider to help your diversity recruiting strategy are the following:
Provide Training Opportunities
Training opportunities can help you retain your staff because it can help with their career advancement. But, the benefit of this does not end there because knowing that you are offered; this type of opportunity makes you a more attractive employer for many candidates.
Remote and Flexible Working Opportunities
You have to remember that everybody has their own circumstances. Unfortunately, many recruiters think that all candidates thrive well in an 8 to 5 setting. As a result, they can miss out on genuine diverse talents. This is why offering remote or flexible work opportunities can be a good idea.
Remote and flexible work opportunities can help encourage those who have children or sick relatives to apply. Plus, remote and flexible work setup also has a lot of benefits for employers when it comes to lowering overhead costs and maximizing productivity.
Mentoring Opportunities
Mentoring opportunities can also help attract diverse applicants to consider applying for your vacant positions. This will help those who are not confident but have the necessary skills to submit their applications. Plus, mentoring can also help boost employees’ morale and your company’s image.
Create a Diverse Recruitment Team
If your intention is to truly create a diverse team, building a diverse team of recruiters is the most basic thing that you can do. Not only will these people help implement your diversity recruitment strategy better, but they can also add to it, improving it along the way.
Develop A Brand That Highlight Your Diversity
Let it be known that diversity is one of your company’s core values by highlighting it in your brand’s image. You can do this by talking about the benefits and importance of diversity with your employees and ingraining its values in your company culture.
Diverse candidates are more likely to gravitate to employers who value diversity. This will organically help you build a more diverse pool of people.
Final Words
The unconscious bias in your decision-making process and lack of diversity in your workforce can be significantly detrimental to your business. It prevents you from hiring genuine talents and, at the same time, underutilizes the potential you have in your business. This is why it is important to improve your diversity recruiting strategies.
The idea of diversity has been in existence for a long time already. But, truth be told, although there have already been improvements in making a more inclusive society, lack of diversity is still a major issue because of deep-rooted segregation mindsets. But, with the diversity recruiting strategy tips mentioned above, the biases, whether unconscious or conscious, can be mitigated to help you create a more diverse workforce.
