by Organizations that embrace diversity are more innovative and do a better job of meeting community needs. A lack of diversity can inhibit your organization’s creativity and even make you the focus of public criticism.
There are two main categories of diversity:
- Acquired diversity: Factors such as education, experience, values, skills and knowledge.
- Inherent diversity: Demographic characteristics like race, sex, and age.
Workplace diversity is defined as understanding, accepting, and valuing differences between people of different races, ethnicities, genders, ages, religions, disabilities, and sexual orientations, as well as differences in personalities, skill sets, experiences, and knowledge bases.
Strategies:
Use a personality assessment to recruit more diverse candidates The usual criteria for recruiting candidates what company they worked at, what school they went to, who they’re connected with can often work to decrease the diversity of the candidate pipeline. Fortunately, a valid and reliable personality assessment is a great tool to measure candidates’ personality traits, motivations, and skills.
Personality assessments increase workplace diversity because they don’t show adverse impact, that is, personality scores do not differ for minority group members.
Offer testimonials from current employees
Testimonials let your employees speak about the ways your organization values diversity and lives it through its culture and actions. These personal statements can help diverse job seekers feel that someone with their identity will be welcomed, supported, and successful in the workplace.
Cast a wider net
To improve your workforce diversity, you need to diversify your recruitment sources. Don’t abandon the sources that have worked. Instead, expand your efforts. Add even more career fairs, job boards, media outlets, networking events, and affinity groups, targeting those that attract diverse candidates by design.
Share your jobs in surprising ways
To recruit a more diverse workforce, go beyond the predictable job boards. Create a video or animation to show off your job opportunities and diverse workplace culture. Grab the attention of more people by sharing jobs through newer social media, like Instagram and Snapchat, or by braving live streaming video. Attend in-person community events where you can connect with people who otherwise wouldn’t have heard about your job opportunities.
Recruit through refugee, immigrant, and community groups
Workforce diversity often means embracing non-traditional talent. Recruiting refugees, immigrants, and people from distinct groups can be a boon for employers committed to diversity. Look for community groups, government agencies, staffing firms, and adult education centers in your area that match job seekers with employers.
Show diversity in your recruitment materials
Update your recruitment materials to showcase a visibly diverse group of employees. While you can be a bit aspirational, don’t stray too far from reality. Potential employees can be turned off if your materials misrepresent the true diversity in your workforce. And never manipulate real staff photos and information to alter the diversity they show.
Improve your recruitment website
If your organization is committed to diversity, your recruitment website needs to follow through on that commitment. This requires more than splashing a diversity statement somewhere. Eliminate coded language, gender bias, and insider jargon. Use your recruitment system to make sure your site is easy to use and is accessible to people with diverse abilities, linguistic competence, and access to technology.
Tap into your team’s network
Word of mouth is still one of the most effective recruiting tactics. According to a 2015 study, when employees recruit within their network, workforce diversity can improve. What matters is that the employer keeps track of word-of-mouth referrals so that one group doesn’t dominate over time. Employers can also encourage employees to spread the word to candidates with diverse backgrounds.
Bring your campus recruiting to other schools
Look beyond elite colleges to schools that have an economically and socially diverse student body. Recruit at schools that are committed to keeping education accessible and affordable and that have diversity integrated into their identity. This can include historically black colleges and universities, hispanic-serving institutions, women’s colleges, public and community colleges, and schools with cooperative education programs.
Mesh diversity with cultural fit
Diversity is more than how people look. Cultural fit is more than hiring people who think and act the same. Truly diverse and culturally vibrant workplaces will include people of different demographics, identities, backgrounds, experiences, abilities, and personalities. The key is to recruit people who are united by the values of the organization, and who can contribute to the organization’s success.
Using Technology
Blind interviews
Extending the blind resume concept is the blind interview. Companies are implementing blind interviews by removing personal identifying information from applications and getting candidates to anonymously answer job-related questions. However, the recruitment process for candidates at most organizations includes a phone screen. It’s almost impossible to anonymize a voice over a phone call unless you’re using technology that’s specifically going to do this for you.
Blind resumes
The most common blind hiring method being tested currently is to remove the candidate’s name from their resume.
The theory behind removing the candidate’s name from his or her application is that it helps recruiters make decisions with reduced unconscious biases of the candidate’s race and gender. Other identifying personal information that is being removed from resumes is graduation year, college names, and even addresses. This helps you identify high quality candidates because it enables you to more objectively evaluate a candidate’s skills, knowledge, and potential to succeed.
Resume screening using AI
Technology that uses AI is enabling recruiters and talent acquisition professionals to automate the most tedious and time-consuming part of their day: Screening resumes and Shortlisting candidates.
Automated resume screening increases diversity by replacing manual shortlisting.
This allows you to have a system that objectively and consistently applies shortlisting criteria across all candidates, which reduces problems related to compliance and discrimination.
Automated resume screening software lives inside your existing ATS that automates candidate shortlisting without disruptions to your workflow or the candidate application process.
Retain Diverse Talent
Be amazing at onboarding diverse employees
An often-overlooked part of the recruitment life cycle, onboarding is crucial to employee retention. An employee onboarding survey of over 1000 employed US workers revealed that 31 percent of people left a job within the first six months, with 68 percent of those departing within three months.
Onboarding should be more than just the paperwork done on your new hire’s first day. Effective onboarding includes properly introducing the new employee to the rest of the team, helping them navigate their surroundings, and training them on the specific tools and processes they’ll need to do their job.
Train managers to lead diverse teams
Managers need to understand that their behaviors impact their team members’ sense of belonging. Train them to become aware of unconscious biases and how to identify talent that may seem different.
Encourage them to continuously assess their processes to ensure that everyone on the team gets the same opportunities are assignments given to everyone, including those who don’t raise their hands? Motivate managers to become more inclusive by rewarding them for retaining diverse talent.
Create mentorship and sponsorship opportunities
Every employee can benefit from having someone who will help them be better at their jobs and advocate for them. Minority candidates benefit from this even more. Many organizations have mentorship programs, some specifically targeting diverse employees for this reason.
Stand in solidarity with diverse employees
Skye Parr, an attorney at Husch Blackwell, spoke on one of the law firm’s webinars of how recent events involving racism and police brutality have impacted black employees.
Develop a formal retention plan
Companies are starting to realize the value of developing a personalized retention plan. A retention plan often involves “stay interviews” check-in meetings with diverse employees to check that their needs are being met. Experts recommend having “stay interviews” at least twice a year.
Make the path to growth transparent
Make sure everyone knows what opportunities are available, and what competencies are needed to get to the next level. One example of how to do this is to make your promotion criteria public. Additionally, assess whether there are unwritten rules of career advancement at your company.
Support the creation of communities within your organization
We’ve mentioned that having friends at work makes work life happier. In the case of underrepresented employees, it can make a world of difference to have people who can help them on their journey.
Support your diverse hires in forging connections. One way to do this is by supporting employees who want to form communities based on shared identities. Ask them how you can help, what resources they need, and how they want to promote the initiative company-wide.
Address unconscious bias
We all believe we are ethical, unbiased decision makers, but studies into unconscious biases deeply ingrained stereotypes that influence our behavior prove otherwise.
Our unconscious biases influence how we hire, onboard, manage, and promote employees. Here are a few examples of how unconscious bias can play out in the workplace:
- Ignoring a colleague or forgetting to cc them in emails.
- Telling a female employee that they’re pushy, bossy, aggressive, or intimidating.
- Making assumptions about a person’s role in the company.
- Consistently leaving a teammate out of bonding activities.
