by Being diversity-friendly is not just about changing the processes and support systems in the workplace. It requires a deeper-level mindset change a move towards unbiased acceptance of diverse individuals as equals in the workplace. This means CHROs must look at every HR intervention with a new lens if diversity is to be adopted as a business priority.
Technology is making it easier than ever to improve diversity levels and reduce discrimination, through providing greater transparency and insight. When an organisation adopts innovative technology and practices at the forefront of the talent’s journey into an organisation, the first thing that happens is you get better insight. You are able to see what is happening at different stages of recruitment, from who the marketing attracts for which roles, to how candidates are reviewed by different departments and managers, and how those candidates progress through the recruitment process down to a granular level of detail. Recruitment technology can monitor job offer rates by specific interviewers for example, allowing you to uncover conscious and unconscious bias.
Once you have the visibility, the second major impact technology has is that it enables you to start making changes based on the data you see, and measure the impact of these changes. As you make changes, whether it is diversity awareness training for hiring managers or a different recruitment marketing strategy, you can see what happens, who you hire and where you can continue to make improvements.
Special needs: One example of special needs is the fact that many women may need to take time off for maternity. Often, women are seen as the primary caregiver in the family and may need time off to care for an elderly person too. Having a non-discriminatory employment model that factors in such needs is important.
Compensation and benefits: Organizations’ compensation philosophy in terms of gender parity should be based on fairness, openness, and transparency.
Safety policies: Prevention of harassment at the workplace is one of the most important roles of HR. It is important to formulate policies keeping in mind the fact that the workplace of the future will be increasingly gender-diverse. Sexual, physical and emotional harassment policies should be clearly outlined and platforms provided for employees to safely report misconduct.
Training and development: Mentoring and coaching can help underrepresented minorities (including women) gain confidence and direction in the business world. Sensitization workshops can be conducted across the organization to help employees accept diverse working styles, expectations, and problem-solving approaches.
Technological benefit
Reduce unconscious bias
AI-powered recruiting solutions can be trained to perform objective assessments of skills, competencies, and talents, while ignoring demographic factors like gender, race, and age. Take, for example, bowmo an HR-based software as a service platform (SaaS) that helps eliminate the bias in database and resume searches. A pure skill-set-matching algorithm based on the Boyer-Moore string search algorithm makes this possible. The software is so designed that it does not use name, race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or disability as screening parameters. It purely assesses the correct fit basis role, years of experience, technical skill/s, and sometimes education.
Removing Barriers
Beyond visibility and measurement, technology can increasingly help remove remaining visible and invisible barriers. Many businesses increasingly recognise the need to adapt recruitment process to avoid turning off certain groups of candidates, for instance those who require reading support or those whose first language is not English. One of the most dramatic technology-developments to combat discrimination in recent years is ‘talking technology’, making the online recruitment process more accessible to all.
Create job descriptions that appeal to diverse candidates
Job descriptions are usually an afterthought in recruiting. However, they are an important factor of an organization’s overall human capital strategy. In addition to setting candidate expectations, job descriptions are also an essential compliance checkpoint. Today, AI-powered analytics solutions can help employers identify bias in job descriptions, such as phrases that tend to be more masculine than feminine and recommend alternate phrases, words or sentences that help recruiters write more inclusive job descriptions. This can help reach out to the largely untapped diverse candidate pool out there.
Continual Improvement
Improving an organisational approach to diversity is a journey that never ends. We always need to analyse, review, and keep striving to improve. Many leading organisations are setting up dedicated community areas of careers websites for particular groups, which allow candidates to find out more specific and relevant information. Particular examples are disability pages on corporate career sites with functionality for candidates to engage in a conversation yet remain anonymous, providing them with an opportunity to explain any disabilities or unusual circumstances that might hinder their chances during the recruitment process prior to applying. Other recent smart approaches have been portals based at hiring specific groups such as women within technology. These portals highlight the successful careers that have already been forged, and have a warmer and more engaging language, in comparison to the often cold words of a job description, leading to higher levels of candidate engagement and ultimately greater number of applicants.
Highlight disparity in compensation
Embracing workforce analytics to address the diversity issue can help significantly. An analytics platform can comb through data from multiple sources and provide insights on the recruitment, compensation and benefits patterns of the organization, revealing pay gaps across the diverse workforce. A data-driven approach like this attaches real numbers to the diversity issue and can help CHROs create a strong business case to tackle the diversity and inclusion issue on priority.
