Diversity improves organization performance. This is because diverse groups bring a broader range of experiences and not old ideas generated by people with similar backgrounds.
But companies have to be intentional to achieve diversity in their organizations. First, they need to seek out and hire applicants from diverse backgrounds. This helps them avoid establishing a homogenous workforce.
Here are a few tips that can help expand the diversity of your candidate pool.
-
Audit Your Jobs During Talent Acquisition
Ensure you carry out an audit of your previous recruiting advert. Then make necessary revisions to address a broader range of potential candidates. Auditing is one of the greatest ways to ensure a diverse pool of candidates.
While auditing, you will take note of your language usage. The language could cater to a specific demographic and their level of experience.
Once you denote this, you can tweak your language to be more inclusive. This way, you’ll be able to appeal to a wider range of candidates from different backgrounds.
While at it, don’t hesitate to tailor your job ad to a specific demographic in mind. For instance, you may encourage women or people living with disability to apply for the open position.
This strategy gives confidence to the potential applicants. Candidates will know that you’re looking for them and that your organization may be an excellent fit.
-
Meet Them Where They Are
Looking for qualified candidates with diverse backgrounds can be challenging. You can seek help from experienced outsourced recruitment firms. Apart from experience, they are experts in dealing with recruitment in many regions with varying diverse characteristics. You can leverage such experienced outsourced recruitment firms to drive your diversified talent recruitment.
Also, they have robust tools to drive faster recruitment helping you fill your roles with diverse candidates at a fraction of cost. Moreover, you can leverage many online and physical groups to hang out with your preferred talent.
This gives you the best way to directly meet and interact with these groups. As a result, you won’t have to wait for high-quality female tech candidates to discover you. If you go down the outsourcing route, it’s also important to find a firm that specializes in your area of industry. For example if you’re looking to fill a sales director position, you’ll want to work with a sales staffing agency to get the most experienced and diverse candidates in that industry.
You need to be intentional with finding these outlets to achieve a diverse talent pool.
-
Ask for Referrals from Your Diverse Employees
Candidate referral is a common strategy that you might have come across. So most likely, your team members have networks that are similar to their background.
A candidate referral program is the best way to improve diversity recruitment strategy. This is because it demonstrates that your organization values people with diverse backgrounds.
Sometimes, you may be looking to hire people from a specific demographic. Reaching out to some of these people can refer you to candidates who fit that description.
You can encourage them to share your job openings with their contacts. For a smooth process, provide enough resources they might need for advertising.
This is a great way of boosting your employee and recruits’ morale. You’ll be surprised by how this small act is valuable to them.
-
Tailor Company Policies to be Attractive to Different Applicants
Ensure that you embody your principles to attract diverse people. Adopting firm rules that appeal to different candidates will help when talent is recruiting.
You first need to understand and observe religious holidays for all your staff. Also, encouraging flexible working hours makes you desirable to a large pool of candidates.
Allow employees to speak whenever they feel the policies are impending diversity. There are greater chances of getting entangled with individual prejudices in an organization. Encourage open and honest communication for everyone to feel valued and welcomed.
These policies are essential during the talent acquisition process as they foster diversity. Making sure that you are heard about these things sets you ahead in attracting buy-ins from all company levels.
-
Avoid Unintentional Bias
We are naturally biased when it comes to various topics. Ranging from our taste in music, our friends, the soccer team we support, etc.
Often our unconscious bias determines our behavior. And these are some of the things we want to kill in a diverse and inclusive hiring approach.
Perform unconscious bias training for recruiters. This is an effective solution to prevent unintentional bias recruitment.
You can use a hiring platform to screen resumes and put out job offers. This helps avoid some of the most human-prone errors in candidate selection.
Blind resumes could be another effective technique to use during talent acquisition. These reumes black out any personal information from the resumes.
Names, date of birth, schools, geographical regions sometimes contribute to unintentional bias. So it’s easier for recruiters to offer a biased appraisal of the candidate to some extent.
Also, one can use a talent acquisition management platform for blind interviews. It functions as a blind resume but uses text-based questions and hiring platforms. This helps recruiters learn about the candidates’ skills and competencies.
-
Automate Your Talent Acquisition With an ATS
A job applicant tracking system (ATS) helps cut down your list to potential prospects. Use the screening feature in your ATS to short-list high-potential applicants.
An ATS allows you to concentrate on data relevant to the job description. It eliminates the bias and personal thoughts on specific candidates. Using particular criteria allows your organizations to achieve greater diversity.
Your talent pool plays a vital role in talent acquisition and recruitment. If you vary, you’re certain to attract a diverse range of individuals and backgrounds.
You could use the ultimate diversity recruiting strategy if you missed this stage.
-
Consider Standardizing Your Interview Procedures
Use the same questions and interview techniques for everyone during interviews. This will help you deal with various prospects.
Your organization will reduce the risk of unconscious prejudice and therefore provide a better benchmark for measuring prospects.
Final Takeaway
Diversity refers to the belief that your staff reflects society as a whole. And so, your hiring policies should be inclusive and free of biases. This should also reflect on how you treat every individual or group of individuals.
You can use the above strategies to ensure you own a diverse recruitment strategy. It could be auditing, employee referrals, blind resumes, etc. It can be challenging to hire and retain top talent if an organization lacks diversity in its team.