Diversity hiring across organizations
Whether you are a recruiting manager at a multinational corporation or the CEO of a fast-growing startup, it is your responsibility to develop the best team possible. Whereas every organization has its own unique hiring needs, and may employ a number of hiring techniques to meet them, assembling a diverse staff is critical regardless of the size of the department or company. The use of typical (traditional) recruitment methods on the other hand, may result in a great amount of homogeneity in the candidate pool. This lack of diversity has far-reaching consequences beyond appearances: It can jeopardize your company’s ability to compete and have a negative impact on your bottom line.
In this post, we will go over some strategies for incorporating diversity into hiring processes that every organization should consider when putting together a successful hiring strategy.
Understanding diversity hiring
Workplace diversity has become a hot button issue and a key concern for HR departments in recent years, and companies are becoming more deliberate in their efforts to increase diversity, not only to show solidarity with underrepresented employees, but also because many companies are now realizing that a diverse team brings different ideas, skill sets, and backgrounds to the table, resulting in richer conversations and more innovative and inclusive solutions for your customers. So, what does it mean to hire from a diverse pool of candidates?
Hiring based on merit with a focus on decreasing biases based on a candidate’s age, race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and other personal characteristics unrelated to job performance is known as diversity hiring. The misconception that the goal of diversity recruiting is to promote workplace diversity for the sake of variety may lead to misunderstandings about diversity hiring. The goal of diversity hiring is to identify and eradicate potential biases in applicant sourcing, screening, and shortlisting that may be inadvertently ignoring, dismissing, or discriminating against qualified, diverse candidates.
Strategies to infuse diversity hiring into your organization
Although many firms have made significant progress toward guaranteeing diversity, recent headlines show how far we still have to go to attain comprehensive diversity in the workplace. Recruiters and talent acquisition experts can focus on attracting and increasing diversity by incorporating the processes outlined below in their hiring processes:
1) Conduct a diversity hiring audit on your present hiring process to set feasible goals
Assess the diversity of your present hiring process and identify any potential bottlenecks and disparities before establishing your diversity recruiting strategy. Is it a problem at the top of the funnel? Or perhaps it’s a problem with a leaking pipeline. You cannot achieve your objectives if you don’t know where to begin. You can set reasonable goals depending on your hiring capacity after you understand your current diversity.
2) Choose one metric to improve your diversity hiring
Altering your diversity hiring metrics can be quite challenging. The simplest way to improve
your diversity hiring is to pick one metric to improve upon at a time. For example, you may want to increase the number of skilled female employees in tech-related areas by 10% in six months or increase the number of qualified visible minorities on your sales team by 15% within 12 months.
3) Employ screening tests to eliminate unconscious bias around diversity
Screening tests allow you to concentrate on the abilities and experiences that are important for a position. These tests, also known as job simulators or pre-employment exams, enable you to evaluate a candidate’s skills in relation to the tasks they will be performing in the role they are applying for.
Moreover, screening tests help to eliminate unconscious bias that can arise throughout the hiring process. Biases that are common (but not limited to) include:
- Geographical bias: When you allow prejudices about a person’s community or country of origin to impact your assessment of their performance.
- Educational background bias: Choosing one candidate above another based on your familiarity with or knowledge of their educational history.
- Gender bias: The expectation that a given gender will perform better or worse on specific skills than the average (or other applicants).
- Affinity bias: When you have a significant preference for a candidate who shares your interests and values.
These and other prejudices may jeopardize your efforts to diversity your staff. You may reduce unconscious prejudice and give an objective assessment of performance by incorporating screening tests into your diversity recruiting efforts.
4) Be on the lookout for diversity recruiting websites
When seeking for a diverse workforce, you should use correct employment sites and forums to find people. Diversity.com, PDN Recruits and Black Career Network and other internet tools provide diversity recruiting solutions for various demographic segments and backgrounds, which you may incorporate into your job advertising strategy depending on your goals.
5) Train your recruiting team on diversity hiring
Every team member must be on board while developing a diversity strategy. In order to achieve this, diversity training is essential. Diversity training aims to raise knowledge of various diversity criteria as well as the factors that can suppress them. Identifying unconscious biases,
understanding civil rights violations, and analyzing diversity policies put in place by your firm could all be included in your training.
The need to increase diversity in employment is a widely held belief. On the other hand, ensuring its implementation can be quite challenging because it is more than just a numbers game.
Diversity hiring is a critical success strategy that every firm should implement into its planning and operations. Using the above-mentioned strategies, leaders may make greater progress and develop a more representative, fair, and high-performing workforce.
So why don’t you take a page from this article and prioritize broadening your skill pool?
