by A company’s workforce is its lifeblood. Whether your company creates the latest nano-tech or engages in doing some social service, the people you hire matter the most. The role of recruiters is especially important when it comes to establishing and maintaining a diverse and equal workplace as having a diverse workplace is not easy. Different people communicate differently and have different ways of synthesizing and interpreting data. Recruiters must be able to navigate the gender divides, geographic divides, age gaps, and cultural divides amongst others to establish a diverse workforce.
Although diversity and inclusion-in-the-workplace initiatives start at the top, recruiters play a key role in who moves forward to the next round of interviews and, ultimately, who gets hired.
As someone who has worked in the recruitment marketing industry for over five years, It’s found that for inclusion and diversity initiatives to move forward, recruiters need more training and need to understand the experience of Black professionals and what makes them unique.
Recruiters and Unconscious Bias
Indeed, even at top consulting firms that have diversity and inclusion initiatives in place, some of their own recruiters don’t fully understand the meaning of diversity and inclusion. It’s even harder for them to see or understand the Black experience.
In fact, in an alarming experience, one White recruiter shared another company’s employer branding video, which focused on the experience of Black professionals and what their hair means to them, in a group chat. The recruiter couldn’t understand why their experience with their hair was being highlighted, and she thought it was inappropriate.
Situations like this further underscore the need for thorough and rigorous diversity and inclusion training for recruiters so diversity and inclusion in the workplace can advance.
Strategies:
Diverse workforce is good for compliance
There are strong anti-discriminatory laws in most of the developed and developing economies of the world. Therefore, attracting a diverse set of people to your workforce as a policy will help you avoid the legal complications that sometimes even the biggest companies face. Such diverse hiring policies come to rescue when you have to let go of an employee and your company is less likely to face litigation.
Diverse workforce is more productive
A combined study conducted by Massachusetts Institute of Technology and George Washington University revealed that people are happier working with same gender and yet teams with gender diversity are more productive. The impact of gender diverse team is nothing less than extraordinary on the company’s bottom line with researchers estimating that offices with an evenly distributed workforce of men and women stand to gain 41% in revenue. This can be attributed to the fact that employees work less and socialize more when matched with people who are similar to them.
Diversity in the workplace is profitable
Multiple researches have revealed that organizations which leverage diversity and provide an environment conducive to participation from people of diverse backgrounds experience better financial performance in the long run than organizations which are not so good at managing diversity. A study also found that the annual returns for the 100 companies which ranked at the bottom in equal employment opportunities issues, average 7.9 percent, when compared to 18.3 percent for the 100 companies that rated highest in their equal employment opportunities.
Recognize your own biases and reduce them to increase diversity in the workplace
In order to address diversity challenges, as a recruiter you must first recognize your conscious and unconscious bias that are coming in way of making the best hiring choices. Everyone has certain leanings and preferences, often referred to as biases, and many a times we are unaware of these preferences. For example, many recruiters tend to ignore candidates with regional accents or disabilities. Then, we also have these assumptions about young people being more creative, innovative and energetic than older candidates. Once we have all our biases out in the open it will be easy to identify how these are impacting our choices of recruitment. Once this has been done, it will allow you to judge candidate on their individual merits, qualifications and competencies needed for a particular role.
Evaluate the diversity of your current team
It is necessary to constantly evaluate the diversity composition of your current employees and the initiatives taken at the company to maintain this composition. For instance, you could analyze the gender composition, the median age of employees, the cultural background that the employees belong to and other characteristics that currently represent your staff. Find the diversity strengths of the company and how you can build on those strengths. Also, take note of the diversity challenges and the areas that need to be addressed in the future.
Attracting diverse candidates to your company
Having a diverse workforce requires you to help professionals from different backgrounds find your company and the job you have posted. However, many recruiters narrow down their recruitment advertising to channels that are likely to offer candidates with similar backgrounds, which needs to change. Also, recruiters must be careful how job advertisements are worded, making sure that the language used does not imply bias towards candidates of a certain “type”. There are online tools and editorial help that can tune out such words or phrases that may subconsciously repel professionals from certain backgrounds while applying.
Explore new recruitment technologies as a part of diversity recruitment strategy
As the world of recruitment evolves, companies must be ready to involve technology to increase the reach of their sourcing campaigns. Adopting full scale recruitment software that allows sourcing from multiple channels at the click of a button can give employers an advantage when looking to tap into more diverse talent pools. Also, crawling technology which finds potential fits for a role by scouring their online profiles allows companies to access candidates from beyond their usual talent pools.
