A company’s culture is the sum total of the people who make the company. A diverse workforce brings a range of perspectives and experiences to the organization. This leads to more innovative and creative solutions to business challenges.
Companies that prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) tend to perform better financially and have better business outcomes.
Depending on the stage of your company, DEI recruiting can also help you in legal compliance. Ensuring DEI in the recruitment process can help you comply with equal employment opportunity laws and regulations that prohibit discrimination in hiring.
And the employer brand boost is a huge obvious plus. When you prioritize DEI in recruitment you’re perceived as more attractive to job candidates, particularly those from underrepresented groups.
Developing a diversity and inclusion (D&I) strategy begins with rounding up the current state and an achievable short-term goal paired with a long-term vision.
Once you have done the analysis for your current status and mapped out goals that are aligned as well as achievable, you need to get to the tactical bits of implementation. Let us understand the key pillars of a DEI recruiting strategy:
Setting diversity targets can help ensure that the company is actively working toward a more inclusive workforce. These targets should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.
Here is an example of how you might set diversity targets for recruitment at your company:
Step 1: Identify the areas of diversity: Let’s assume you have identified gender and race as the primary areas of diversity that it wants to focus on.
Step 2: Determine the current state of diversity: Let’s say, the review of your company's workforce demographics shows that the current workforce is predominantly male (70%) and white (80%). In addition, only 20% of leadership roles are held by women and 5% are held by individuals from underrepresented racial or ethnic groups.
Step 3: Setting Targets: We need our DEI targets to be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). Based on this information, the company sets the following SMART targets:
Step 4: Monitor progress and adapt as needed: You need to regularly review progress against the targets and make any necessary adjustments to the plan. This may involve providing additional training and resources to support diversity and inclusion in the recruitment process, and adapting the targets as needed based on progress.
Job descriptions are most times, the first touch with candidates. While we might not create job descriptions with underlying biases, they can turn out to be exclusionary due to a certain tone or choice of words.
We should review their job descriptions and requirements to ensure that they are not biased or unnecessarily exclusionary. This could include avoiding language that is too narrow or overly specific or using more inclusive language that does not discriminate based on race, gender, age, or other factors.
Let’s understand this better with an example.
In this revised job description, the language has been made more inclusive by removing the requirement for a specific degree and a certain amount of experience. This allows candidates of different backgrounds and experiences to feel welcome to apply for the role. Additionally, the language used is more inclusive and does not discriminate based on race, gender, age, or other factors.
Companies should consider using a variety of recruitment sources in order to reach a diverse pool of candidates. This could include job boards, professional associations, and networking events that cater to underrepresented groups.
There are several ways that companies can use diverse recruitment sources to support diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in their recruitment efforts:
It's important to ensure that hiring managers and recruiters are trained to identify and avoid bias in the recruitment process. If needed, we should be able to provide training on diversity and inclusion, as well as implement systems to track and monitor progress.
There are several ways to train hiring managers and recruiters to ensure diversity and inclusion (DEI) goals:
Conventionally, sourcing is done in bulk from data sources thus representing the inherent majority and a lack of diversity. When you source candidates with intent and focus on building a diverse talent pool, the closed candidates are more likely to be diverse. All through the year, as a recruiter, if you look at a profile that fits your DEI goals, you need to add them to a talent pool and engage with them. The goal is to build a pipeline of candidates that will make filling future roles easier.
You can then use recruitment automation strategies to continually engage with these candidates to prime them for when the time is right for both the candidate and you.
We should clearly define and use metrics to track progress toward DEI goals and hold hiring managers and recruiters accountable for meeting these goals. This could include tracking the diversity of the candidate pool, the diversity of hires, and the representation of underrepresented groups in leadership roles.
Some possible metrics to measure DEI recruiting include:
It's important to regularly review and assess the effectiveness of the DEI strategy, and make any necessary adjustments. This can involve gathering feedback from employees, monitoring progress against targets, and adapting the strategy as needed.
To easy and more diverse recruiting!