Diverse Recruitment Strategies

Diverse recruitment is a method of hiring candidates using hiring processes that are free of bias.

Although deliberate hiring bias is becoming less common, many recruiters still base their decisions on unconscious biases. These can include racial, generational, and gender biases. Regardless of form, eliminating these biases from your hiring process provides only benefits for employers. A Boston Consulting Group survey in 2018 found that companies with above-average diversity experienced a greater portion of revenue from innovation, an impressive 45%. Employing a diverse workforce means your company team will enjoy a diversity of ideas and drive innovation.

Diversity in recruitment has become a focus of many employers today. However, diversity is more than a business goal to achieve better results and performance. It’s about building equality in the workplace.

Achieving this diversity has proven to be a challenge, however. Traditional hiring strategies are rife with opportunities that allow bias to creep into the hiring process, creating a homogenized workplace. Additionally, even modern solutions such as AI recruitment software can be given biased data to create systemized biased results. That’s why diverse recruitment requires a careful and conscious approach.

Diversity and Inclusion in the Workplace

Diversity and inclusion in the workplace are more than numbers and policies. A diverse and inclusive workplace is valued by employees, earning deeper trust and commitment. Consequently, this creates workplaces with higher worker morale.

But what do we mean by diversity and inclusion? Are they not the same? You may be surprised to find they are not. Although they are related concepts, they are not interchangeable.

Inclusion refers to how well the contributions and perspectives of different groups are valued and integrated into a business. After all, what good is a diverse workplace if you don’t hear all of the voices on the team? Workplaces where only a handful of groups are valued or carry any influence could be diverse, but they are by no means inclusive.

The same can be said of diversity and inclusion in recruitment. A recruitment strategy may be diverse, but it is not necessarily inclusive. Even diverse recruitment methods may be biased against certain groups that don’t fit into a certain mold. As a result, these methods prevent employers from building diverse and inclusive workplaces regardless of their efforts.

Diverse Recruitment Strategies

Diverse recruiting adds tangible benefits for performance and innovation. This is because it provides workplaces with employees that have a broader range of skills, increased language and cultural awareness, and larger varied candidate pools. To achieve diverse recruiting benefits, your team will need to adopt diverse recruitment strategies.

One diverse recruitment strategy is to reevaluate your job ads. Do they speak to a broad range of candidates? With diverse recruiting in mind, you may notice that some of the language you used in the past were geared toward a specific demographic rather than a broader audience. Adapting your job postings to be more inclusive can appeal to candidates from a broader range of backgrounds.

In candidate screening, the use of blind resumes can help remove the bias. This involves removing personal information such as names, schools, date of birth, and so on to cut down on potential bias. To bring this method into this decade, utilize machine learning solutions such as Qualifi that categorize candidates for you based on keywords rather than intuition.

Another approach is to adopt interview software tools that allow you to mitigate bias in the hiring process. For example, Qualifi’s on-demand interview platform allows you to record and give the same interview to all your candidates, reducing personal bias in the interview process. Additionally, using machine learning and AI with unbiased facts and data to screen candidates removes human bias from much of the hiring process.

Using a diversity recruiting strategy template can also help you adapt and align your team to these strategies both in the workplace and in the hiring process.

Diverse Sourcing

To improve diversity in the workplace, hiring managers need to adopt diverse sourcing strategies. These strategies allow you to organically reach more diverse candidates, increasing the chances of qualified diverse candidates applying to positions with your companies.

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One such option is to encourage diverse employees to refer their connections for any positions that may open in the company. Roughly 90% of companies say they already find new candidates through their current employees. Asking this of your hires means an employee referral program has a strong chance of further diversifying candidate sourcing.

Another way to source more diverse candidates for your talent pool is to source from a wider variety of sources. Relying on the same sources repeatedly can create a stagnant and homogenous pool of candidates. Seek diverse candidates where they hang out, like online communities that focus on women in technology for example.

Similarly, tap diverse sources such as historically Black colleges and universities and professional groups. This allows your team to reach out to highly skilled and diverse candidates to add to your talent pool and, hopefully, your workplace.

Accessible Interviewing

You will need an accessible interview solution alongside your diverse recruitment strategies. Accessibility allows you to reach a greater number of candidates.

With the pandemic came a host of these solutions to solve the problem of remote hiring. This includes on-demand video and audio interviews that allow recruiters and candidates to approach interviews at their convenience.

In the average week, 128 hours fall outside of the work day. Qualifi found that 43% of job candidates prefer to interview during these hours. What’s more, many candidates have a hard time finding extra hours to interview during the 9-5 workday, if it is possible at all. With on-demand interviews, your recruiters can interview 24/7, allowing you to accommodate these candidates.

However, video interviews limit who you can reach. Unlike phone interviews, video interviews require candidates to have a camera and microphone and a clean and presentable space to conduct their interviews. Which, of course, is not something everyone has access to.

Contrast this with the on-demand phone interview that Qualifi offers. Roughly 97% of Americans own a cell phone which is enough for a one-way phone interview. Video interviews also require a stable internet connection, something only 77% of Americans had in 2015. That’s why, in terms of accessibility, on-demand phone interviews are possibly the most accessible remote interview solution available to recruiters.