The Recruiter’s Ultimate Guide to Diversity

According to the latest research, diverse companies have a2.3 times higher rate of cash flow for each employee than companies that aren’t as diverse.

If you aren’t currently focusing on diversity hiring, there are even more benefits to improving your recruiting process.

But what do you need to know when you want to hire for diversity? Keep reading to discover all you need to know about diversity hiring.

What Is Diversity Hiring?

Diversity hiring is when you have a hiring process that tries to reduce unconscious biases that might mean you hire people because of the candidate’s race, gender, religion, age, sexual orientation, or other factors that will not affect their job performance.

When you focus on workplace diversity, you actively try to overcome those unconscious biases. You’ll likely have some unconcerned preferences in your hiring process, even if you’ve tried not to have them.

With a diverse recruitment process, you’ll have a better strategy and assess candidates on a modest scale.

Why Is It Important?

Diversity recruiting is important not because there is a legal and ethical implication for businesses to hire diversely. Most companies also want to hire diverse teams because it can improve productivity and morale and inspire more creativity. It can also help strengthen your employer brand because 80% of candidates said that they would prefer to work at a company that had a diverse workplace.

However, it can also make your diverse employees more comfortable at work when they feel accepted and surrounded by hiring managers and coworkers who are different from them.

You also need to make sure you’re trying to hire diversely and not discriminate because if the government finds out that you’re discriminating, you’ll also have to deal with heavy fines.

Diversity Hiring Mistakes

When you’re implementing a diversity recruiting strategy, you’ll need to take time to plan everything out. If you want it to work correctly, you should start by evaluating your current hiring process. This can help you identify where you need to make some potential changes.

Requiring a GPA

Some companies will post a GPA requirement in the job description to try and find diverse candidates who did well in college. However, this could hurt your diversity efforts.

GPA is not a good indicator of whether or not an employee will be successful at your company because many different factors could be why they have a lower GPA. For example, they may have had to work full-time while also going to school or be brilliant but not good at taking classes and studying for tests. In addition, you may even want to consider if you’re going to require a four-year college degree. In some cases, education may not be a good indicator of success at a job, so you may want to avoid looking at what college a candidate went to because this can also introduce biases.

Not Having a Standard Set of Interview Questions

Depending on different job seekers, interviewers might find it easier to connect with some candidates versus others. However, these connections and diverse backgrounds can lead to unconscious biases. To avoid these situations, interviewers should have a standard set of questions that they’ll ask for each interview process.

These questions should be more about the job or the candidate’s qualifications versus their background and personal information.

Having Gendered Language in Your Job Description

A job posting will be the first point of contact with most candidates, but you may have some unconsciously gendered language in your posting that can turn some candidates off. For example, if you have aggressive words, like “assertive” or “ambitious,” this can turn some female candidates away from applying to your position. This will make it harder to get women in your funnel and hire appropriately.

If you’re trying to hire more men, you’ll want to avoid any feminine language that could put them off. In addition to gendered language, you’ll need to watch out for any language that could put people off because of their ability, age, race, culture, and ethnicity.

Create a Diversity Hiring Plan

If you feel like you need to rehaul your entire hiring process, there are a few steps you’ll need to follow.

Reach Out to Underrepresented Candidates

You’ll need to analyze your current workforce and diverse candidate pool to figure out what types of candidates you don’t have and need to represent. This can be the most impactful for your hiring process because you can get these candidates into the funnel from the beginning.

The dominant demographic at your company will differ depending on where they are and what type of company they are. For some companies, it might be harder to find those candidates, and you may want to consider hiring remotely or globally to build your diverse workforce.

Improve Your Employer Brand

You’ll need to improve your employer’s brand as a diverse company so that people will want to apply for any open positions because you have an accepting company culture. You’ll want to think about the messaging you post on job boards and the language in your job description.

Consider what other businesses you want to partner with and ensure that you’re aligning with other diverse companies that also promote diversity.

You can even start posting your job on niche, diversity job boards. This might make it more visible to people looking to work with a diverse company.

Find Ways to Reduce Bias

You’ll also need to find ways toreduce the bias in your recruiting process . Even the best recruiter will still likely have some of their preferences, but they can do things to minimize that. You can start with education.

When people understand some of their biases, it’s easier to know how to prevent them and be aware of them. When recruiters are aware of these biases, they can strive to create a recruiting process accommodating to as many people as possible.

How to Measure Diversity Hiring

To ensure that your diversity efforts are working, you’ll need to figure out how to measure that it’s working. You’ll need key performance indicators to understand your hiring process. Metrics will help you find any hidden biases affecting your diversity performance.

For example, you can track your retention rate for certain identity groups. Figure out the average tenure across those groups and compare it to your most extensive workforce identity. This will help you determine if you need to improve your diversity efforts and what might not be working.

You’ll also want to consider your hiring process and how many diverse groups make it through the diverse talent pipeline and get to the selection or advancement process. You’ll want to compare them to other candidates, and if they’re not making it through, you can investigate why this is the case.

You should also see how many people apply to your open positions. If you notice that certain groups aren’t even using your job description, you may need to change the language.

Lastly, keep track of how many diversity groups get promoted as well. If you notice that your organization typically promotes only one type of group of people, you may need to review your promotion and selection requirements.

Start Hiring Today

Creating a diverse hiring process can feel overwhelming and challenging, but we’re here to help you. As experts in recruiting, we have all of the tools and solutions you’ll need to start hiring a diverse workforce.

Whether augmenting your human resources department with on-demand recruiters or using a bias-free AI recruiting software, we’ve covered you.

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By Alyssa Harmon