Diversity and Recruitment

Diversity hiring is hiring based on merit with special care taken to ensure procedures have reduced biases related to a candidate’s age, race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and other personal characteristics that are unrelated to their job performance.

A diversity recruitment strategy defines goals, accountabilities, action items and success measures for attracting, engaging, assessing and hiring diverse talent to drive business success. It is often part of a larger diversity and inclusion strategy, developed to ensure a workforce reflects a company’s customer base and the communities where it operates, and to capitalize on the benefits that can come from a diverse range of backgrounds, experiences and perspectives.

Confusion over diversity hiring sometimes lies in the mistaken perception that the goal of diversity recruitment is to increase workplace diversity for the sake of diversity.

The goal of diversity hiring is to identify and reduce potential biases in sourcing, screening, and shortlisting candidates that may be ignoring, turning off, or accidentally discriminating against qualified, diverse candidates.

Businesses have started to recognize diversity in the workplace as a business strategy that maximizes productivity, creativity and loyalty of employees while meeting the needs of their clients or customers. If a company is only as good as their employees, then it stands to reason that a great deal of energy should be devoted to hiring the most talented individuals. By branching out to a diverse workforce, employers have access to a greater pool of candidates thereby improving the odds of hiring the best person. In a competitive marketplace, an organization that puts people first regardless of their race, religion, gender, age, sexual preference, or physical disability has an advantage over the other players.

There are more job openings than people looking for work, companies are facing the tightest labor market in almost 50 years, and workforce demographics are changing fast. Employers are stepping up their game to compete and win valued talent, but it’s a candidate’s market and their demands are high when it comes to workplace diversity.

Goals might look something like this:

• Drive and measure the impact diversity and inclusion has on business results.
• Increase diversity at every level of our organization to better reflect our customer base and the communities we serve.
• Recognize, maximize and reward behaviors that foster a diverse and inclusive culture.

Reconsider Job Requirements

Job specifications may include equal employment opportunity statements, but people who write them often don’t think about factors that influence the chances of certain candidates applying.

Bias at the Sourcing Stage

Bias can enter the search and sourcing process whether you’re male or female, white or black, Latino or Asian, European or American. Case in point: Campbell said an analysis of data from the estimated 80,000 recruiters worldwide who use his platform found that when recruiters search for candidates on LinkedIn, regardless of role, they’re more likely to look at male profiles.

In every profession and at every level of seniority, Campbell said, recruiters end up looking at twice as many male as female profiles.

Train to Spot Bias in Screening

Screening is arguably where most bias comes into play, Campbell said. Unconscious bias training can help. Research has shown that hiring managers, whether male or female, rate male candidates as more competent and hirable than identical female candidates for STEM positions.

Work to Ensure a More Balanced Slate

Whether the priority is more diversity based on race, gender, ethnicity or some other dimension, it pays to have a diverse interview slate. A company looking to hire more women may not want to bring in the top four candidates if they’re all men, but swap the top two out for women.

There are several steps that organizations can and should take to promote a diverse work environment:

Create a diversity policy and publicize it.

Your policy should set formal goals and strategies pertaining to creating an equal opportunity environment. Once your policy is in place it should be made public both internally and externally.

Write job descriptions as to not exclude anyone.

Your job description should clearly be written for all types of applicants and should in no way discriminate.

Publicize job openings in different venues to attract a diverse workforce.

Look beyond obvious recruitment methods and venues for good people. There are many sites online that help facilitate equal opportunity employment and include: Yahoo!, En Espanol, Diversity Inc, America’s Job Bank, The Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, the Society of Women Engineers, the National Society of Black Engineers, and the Black Executive Exchange program.

Be aware of current legislation.

Staying current on the latest discrimination legislation will help you avoid potential litigation.

Once the appropriate steps are taken, learning how to manage the diverse workforce will take some time. It requires education, sensitivity and awareness of how individuals from different cultures handle communication, business etiquette, and relate to management. Promoting workforce diversity requires HR recruitment of competent and qualified employees and the accommodation of individual needs within the context of the work team and the organization.

Get more diversity into your hiring funnel

When hiring managers are pressuring your recruiters to hire critical positions as quickly as possible, it can be easy to forget about adding diversity in your funnel. A data-driven recruiter continuously monitors the funnel to see whether diversity increases or decreases as candidates move through the pipeline.

Keep track of your post-hire data

How your diverse hires fare long-term at your organization reveals important insights about your hiring practices. How long these employees stay at the company, how they perform, and how soon they receive promotions can tell you about the quality of your diverse hires.