Diversity in the workplace is very rightly gaining a higher and higher profile. How can you ensure that your organisation either stays or becomes diverse? Throughout this article we will review why you should improve your workplace diversity and how to do it.
First, what are the benefits of creating a more inclusive and diverse team?
Achieving greater diversity is not just the right thing to do either, it is also the smart thing. Homogeny breeds mediocrity and that could spell trouble for the organisation's performance.
The results speak for themselves:
Having a strong recruiting strategy for diversity is a sure-fire way to improve your team’s performance and drive innovation in your industry.
After realising the benefits of workplace diversity, how can you actually implement it?
As always, when attempting to improve a part of your business, it’s important to ask yourself the following questions:
Without asking yourself this it can be very difficult to successfully improve your recruiting strategy for diversity. Sit down with your team and identify what it is that you want to achieve. Do you want to hire more women into technical roles? Gather the exact metrics around how many women you currently employ in those roles, and set a goal of how much you want that to increase by.
Now that you have your goals and metrics in mind, let’s move into how to improve your diversity recruiting.
A great way to ensure that you’re hiring a diverse range of people is to make sure there’s diversity in who is applying to your positions to begin with. Here are some techniques for increasing diversity in your candidate sourcing:
Job descriptions are a notorious minefield of unintentionally biased language. Even single words can be loaded and are enough to make potential candidates feel unwanted or excluded from a position. Avoid gender-coded words like “rock star” or “guru”, eliminate unnecessary corporate jargon that can put people on the back foot and clearly call out particular benefits that could be attractive to those from diverse positions. It’s always a good idea to revisit job descriptions and tweak them to be clear, concise and more inclusive.
Actively seeking to change requires effort and input. Your first port of call should be expanding your sourcing databases and tools to include job boards and sites that cater for diverse talent specifically. By posting on these forums, you open yourself up to a wide-range of talent that could otherwise have been overlooked.
Going back to staff referrals, which are a great thing, why not ask your more diverse staff to refer their friends and previous colleagues to join your business? You can’t always guarantee that they will be the market that you are looking for but it’s another network for you to tap in to that you may have not done before!
This next point is extremely relevant in the current market as I believe that going forward work experience will become harder and harder to come by and so giving young people the chance to try working early and giving that base level of experience will really help produce the next level of market leaders! Offer internship and co-op positions to candidates from specific backgrounds. This is a great way to encourage up and coming candidates in your industry to join your team and get experience.
Often, communities will have their own programs to encourage growth, and teaming up with those initiatives is a great way to give back while also benefiting from new and diverse talent.
There is a power in being upfront. More than ever, potential employees are scouring to find as much information as they can about a company before even applying for positions. That’s why it’s paramount to be completely open about your desire to attract people from diverse backgrounds.
6. Having your company policies reflect your views
It’s one thing to claim that you value diverse recruiting strategies and teams, but it’s quite another to actually live those values daily. That’s why it’s so important to proactively implement company policies that appeal to diverse candidates.
Consider changing your time off and scheduling policies to include more religious holidays, community events, and so on. Encourage flexible work hours that will allow candidates to continue being involved with their communities, and not require them to conform to a cookie-cutter schedule at all times.
It’s also important for management teams to encourage employees to speak up if they think certain policies are hindering diversity in any way. People’s individual biases will always be a factor in how they perceive and navigate the workplace, so it’s important to encourage open and honest dialogue to ensure everyone feels welcome.
Having these policies in place, and actively promoting them in your sourcing, is a great way to ensure your diversity recruiting strategy is running as it should be.
If you find that your diversity recruiting strategy is bringing in a nice variety of candidates, but you’re struggling to eliminate bias in how you screen them, then you should consider some of these tactics.
You can do this yourself or ask your HR teams to do this for you (if you have one) or even when working with search and selection partners they can do it. Ask for no personal information including, gender,race, names, dates of birth, religious views, addresses etc so that there is no way to review CV’s for the role except purely based on the professional and educational background of the individual.
Blind interviews use the same principle as blacking out resumes to reduce bias, but apply this tactic to early conversations with the candidate. They can be accomplished by sending candidates text-based questions via text, or through your recruitment platform of choice. Candidates answer these questions anonymously and are asked to avoid providing personal information.
The goal here is to remain free of bias regarding who you choose to interview further. Obviously, it’s much tougher to remove all personality and bias when talking to candidates on the phone or in person, so blind interviews are most effective early in the process.
This tactic relates back to your job ads audit where you rethought what you look for in a candidate, and how you talk to them. A critical part of diversity recruiting is to always be questioning what traits you value most in candidates, why, and whether that’s based on your own bias.
Take the time to look at how you’re testing and screening candidates, and honestly ask yourself if you’re steering the results towards specific types of people. If you are, consider changing your testing methods.
It’s been proven that diverse candidates are far less likely to be chosen when they are the only ones from their demographic represented in a shortlist of candidates. To combat this decision bias, you can use a diversity recruitment strategy called “the two in the pool effect.”
The premise here is that having multiple people from the same minority demographic drastically increases the likelihood that one of them will be hired. Intentionally seeding your shortlist with a proportionate number of diverse candidates, therefore, will result in a more even playing field when it comes to choosing one to hire.
Of course, you’ll only want to seed your shortlist with candidates who are truly qualified. After all, diversity recruiting is all about hiring the best person, regardless of their background.
And so I hope that this article will inspire you to help make the marketplace more diverse. I would like to ask what you or your business have done to promote diversity and any changes you may have made on the journey?
