Diverse candidates contribute to the innovation and success of organizations, and they help them achieve their business objectives. The challenge of building a diverse company is attracting and hiring diverse talent. So, here are five proactive strategies you can employ to attract and hire diverse candidates as your company expands.
But first,
What is Diversity Hiring?
Diversity in recruitment, also known as diversity hiring, is an unbiased hiring process. The process ensures that no one is judged based on their age, race, gender, sexual orientation, sexual preferences, or any other characteristics unrelated to the job profile. A more modern interpretation of diversity includes a candidate’s age, race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and other personal characteristics unrelated to job performance.
It entails actively seeking candidates from diverse backgrounds and ensuring that their talent and skills are evaluated rather than their background.
Effective Ways to Improve Diverse Hiring Practices
1. Set your diversity hiring goals
Setting hiring goals for diversity will make the process much easier to navigate. More like,
- You will be forced to examine your diversity hiring weaknesses.
- It will assist you in prioritizing and planning for the achievement of your hiring objectives. It could be resources, the workforce, or techniques.
- It will assist you in tracking the progress of your hiring objectives. As a result, you can look back in time and examine the factors that made a difference.
- It will assist you in identifying some critical patterns.
2. Use AI for the hiring process
The application of artificial intelligence to the talent acquisition process, where machine learning can learn to shortlist your ideal candidate as well as automate manual tasks in the recruitment process, is known as AI for recruiting. This technology is intended to simplify or automate a portion of the recruiting workflow, particularly repetitive, high-volume tasks.
With AI hiring software, recruiters will be empowered to be more proactive in their hiring, assess candidates’ cultural fit, and measure KPIs like the quality of hire to improve their relationships with hiring managers.
3. Increase diversity in candidate sourcing
A great step to ensuring that you hire a diverse range of people is to ensure that there is diversity in who applies for your positions in the first place. Here are some methods for increasing the diversity of your candidate sourcing:
- Examine your job postings
One of the most effective ways to recruit diverse candidates is to evaluate your previous job advertisements and make changes to appeal to a wider range of candidates. To improve your diverse hiring process, don’t be afraid to write job ads with targeted audiences in mind. Inform your target candidates that you are looking for them and explain why your company would be a good fit.
- Look for sources where a diverse range of candidates socialize
Getting candidates from a variety of sources is a great way to ensure that your talent pool is full of diverse candidates. Concentrating on only the sources you are most familiar with can result in a talent pool of similar candidates and a lack of diversity. Instead, look for opportunities to find diverse candidates where they hang out. The more you take the initiative to find different channels, the more diverse your talent pools will be.
- Encourage your diverse workforce to refer their contacts
Colleagues are very likely to have networks of people with similar backgrounds to them. Developing a diverse candidate referral program is an excellent way to boost your diversity recruitment strategy while also demonstrating that your company values different perspectives and ideas.
If you want to hire more of a certain cohort, reach out to some of your current coworkers who fall into that category. Encourage them to share your job postings with their networks. Your employees and candidates will both feel valued by your company, which is great for team morale and engagement.
- Provide internships to particular groups
Many businesses have begun internal diversity programs that provide internship and co-op opportunities to candidates from specific backgrounds. This is an excellent way to encourage young professionals in your industry to join your team and gain experience.
Reach out to local colleges and universities to see if there are any opportunities to connect with students. Communities frequently have their own growth programs, and collaborating with those initiatives is a great way to give back while also benefiting from new and diverse talent.
4. Increase diversity in candidate screening
If your diversity recruiting strategy is bringing in a diverse pool of candidates but you’re having trouble eliminating bias in how you screen them, you should consider some of these strategies.
- Leverage blind resumes
Recruiters are increasingly using “clearing out” to remove all personal information from resumes to remove bias from how they screen candidates. Names, schools, dates of birth, specific locations, and so on can all contribute to a biased assessment of the candidate, even if not done consciously.
- Leverage blind interviews
Blind interviews apply the same principle as clearing out personal information on resumes. However, this technique is used in early conversations with the applicants. They can be accomplished by sending text-based questions to candidates via text or through your preferred recruitment platform. Candidates are asked to answer these questions anonymously and not to provide any personal information.
The goal here is to avoid bias in whom you choose to interview further because it is much more difficult to eliminate all personality and bias when speaking with candidates over the phone or in person.
- Use AI to review resumes
Using artificial intelligence technology in your applicant tracking system (ATS) is one way to ensure that bias is completely removed from your resume screening process. Set up your platform to flag and filter for specific skills and experience, and then let AI technology analyze your candidate resumes for those criteria. This will provide you with a completely unbiased shortlist devoid of any bias.
5. Increase diversity in shortlisting
The most difficult part of the diversity recruiting strategy is deciding whom to shortlist and hire. Because you’ll have a pretty good idea of who each candidate is, your own bias will almost certainly creep into the equation. Here are a few techniques to consider to combat this.
- Use an ATS to automate your shortlisting
ATS can be used to objectively narrow down your list to the most high-potential candidates. Use the screening tools built into your ATS to find candidates with the most potential and the best skill set.
This technique allows you to remove personal opinions about specific candidates from the equation and focus solely on information relevant to the job description. Shortlisting candidates based on specific criteria will assist you in moving toward greater diversity.
If your talent pool was diverse at the start of the process, your shortlist should include a diverse range of candidates and backgrounds. If not, the final diversity recruiting strategy can be used.
- Fill talent channels with a diverse range of candidates
It has been proven that when diverse candidates are the only ones from their demographic represented on a shortlist of candidates, they are far less likely to be chosen.
The premise here is that having multiple people from the same minority demographic increases the likelihood that one of them will be hired significantly. Intentionally seeding your shortlist with a proportionate number of diverse candidates will result in a more level playing field when deciding who to hire.
Of course, you should only include qualified candidates on your shortlist. After all, the goal of diversity recruiting is to find the best candidate. Although this is not an exhaustive list of the reasons why hiring for diversity is important, it should give a clearer picture. Making your workplace culture more inclusive will benefit your recruitment efforts, creating a virtuous circle effect. A diverse workforce and executive team have numerous advantages for any organization.
