Cultural diversity within a company can completely transform your business. People of different backgrounds, cultures, religions, race, and gender can bring unique skills, increased productivity, and more creative ideas. The importance of a Diversity recruitment strategy overpasses an increase in business results. Diversity shows that your company values individuals for their work, not for the color of their skin or their age.
Working on your diversity recruitment strategy means that you are ready to contribute to workplace equality.
Transforming the Diversity Recruitment Strategy
If you wonder how to improve your diversity recruitment strategy to maximize your company’s cultural diversity, you are in the right place.
This piece aims to highlight potential drawbacks in your current diversity recruitment strategy as well as give you some ideas on how to transform it.
What is a Diversity Recruitment Strategy?
Diversity recruitment strategy consists of a plan, goals, and actionable steps that lead to hiring a diverse workforce.
A well-formed diversity recruitment strategy should attract and hire employees with different educational qualifications, physical abilities, ethnic backgrounds, sexual orientation, ages, cultures, and so on.
Diversity recruitment strategy needs to be free from biases and give each candidate an equal opportunity.
This strategy lies the foundation for nurturing a diverse culture in your company and, ultimately, capitalizing on benefits that come from diverse recruiting.
Why Diversity Hiring Is Important? Why Is Diversity Recruitment Strategy Relevant and Beneficial?
Diversity recruiting has a long list of benefits that more and more companies are starting to recognize.
As the market evolves and consistently asks for innovation, diversity has proven to be a huge advantage.
Here’s why a diversity recruitment strategy is important for a company:
- Diversity recruiting has larger candidate pools.
- Leadership in diverse environment can boost innovation and the company’s progressiveness.
- Diverse workforces have shown to be better at solving problems.
- Diverse employees bring to the table a wider range of skills and experiences.
- Diversity increases cultural awareness.
- Diversity introduces different perspectives on the same issue.
- Diverse recruiting can attract the best talent.
The statistics support the value of diversity in companies, as these numbers will prove:
- The majority of job seekers (over 86% of them) claim that workplace diversity is an important factor when searching for a job.
- Companies in “the top quartile” for gender diversity are 25% more likely to achieve above-average profitability compared to companies in “the bottom quartile” for gender diversity.
- Companies that have diverse management teams have proven to have higher revenues by 19%.
- Diverse companies are 8 times more likely to be change-ready and 1.7 times more likely to be innovation leaders in their market.
With that being said, we are ready to move on to practical tips on how to transform your diversity recruitment strategy.
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Actionable Steps for Improving Your Diversity Recruiting Strategy
Every improvement within the company starts with action.
You need to form a strategy that will aid you in recruiting a diverse team of employees that will be the perfect fit for your company’s culture.
The following ideas can give you a new perspective on how you can improve your diversity recruitment strategy.
1. Assess your current diversity recruitment strategy
Revise your current processes for diversity recruitment to find drawbacks that prevent you from reaching the company’s full diversity potential.
The state of mind that yearns for a change usually comes from a place of dissatisfaction. So, what don’t you like about your current diversity recruitment strategy?
Some of the common weaknesses in diversity recruitment strategy are:
- Lack of diversity in the recruitment team
- Using only popular job boards for recruitment ads
- Company workplace policies aren’t supportive enough of diverse employees
- Considering only a few diversity characteristics (age and race, for example)
Recognize the aspects of your recruitment strategy that demand improvement and focus on introducing change to those processes.
2. Form a diverse recruiting team
Diversity needs to be present at every level of the company. Your HR team should be an example of cultural diversity that your company advocates for.
Give diverse employees an opportunity to participate in the hiring process. They’ll have a better understanding of how diversity can enrich your company’s work environment.
Moreover, the presence of a diverse team among the recruiting personnel can make diverse job candidates feel more comfortable during the interviewing process.
3. Eliminate bias
Do your best to reduce the chance of bias during the recruitment process.
You can start with a specific KPI, such as hiring “one person older than 55”, “one person without a college education,” etc.
Another good tactic for reducing bias is to hide personal information from the resumes. Delete data like the name, gender, age, marital status, or any other data that isn’t relevant for the job position.
4. Make use out of diverse hiring job boards
Popular hiring boards might be the typical choice of HR teams, but they aren’t the best solution for diverse recruitment.
Spread your search across diverse hiring boards. They’ll help you reach out to a community of diverse job candidates.
While there are many platforms that are focused on diverse employment, here are several websites to get you started:
- Diversity.com (best for finding minority talent at all skill levels)
- Workplacediversity.com (best for finding candidates from various backgrounds)
- BlackCareerNetwork.com (best for finding highly-engaged candidates from the black community)
- iHispano.com (best for finding ambitious candidates from the Latin community)
- CampusPride.jobs (best for finding entry-level candidates from the LGBTQ community)
- Female-Executive-Search.com(best for finding C-level female candidates)
- CareerContessa.com (best for finding ambitious female candidates)
- WorkForce50.com (best for finding candidates over 50 years of age)
- RecruitDisability.com (best for finding candidates with disabilities)
5. Create Diversity-Friendly Workplace Policies
Are your workplace policies supportive of diverse employees?
Revise your workplace policies and ensure that they are diversity-friendly. Otherwise, diverse employees won’t stand a chance in your company.
The changes that you can introduce are:
- Flexible work hours for older employees or working mothers
- Pay equality policy
- Allowing free days for all religious holidays
- Supporting different cultural practices by introducing a meditation room, a prayer room, etc.
- Offering language courses for international employees
- Introducing remote work option
Make sure that you emphasize your diverse-friendly policies in the job ad. Thus, you’ll get more candidate applications and a larger pool of candidates to choose from.
6. Use gender-neutral language in job descriptions
According to research, job listings with gender-neutral wording get 42% more applications.
Rephrase and edit your job description so that it doesn’t specify the gender. Even if you write “he” instead of “they” unintentionally, this can cost you a number of high-qualified candidates that will consider themselves unfitting for this job.
There are online tools that can help you spot any gendered language. Paste your job description in the Gender Decoder for Job Ads tool, and it will let you know if there are any feminine-coded or masculine-coded words in your ad.
7. Encourage diversity in content marketing
Does your brand openly support diversity? If not, things need to change.
Your brand’s image and reputation is an immeasurably valuable asset for diverse recruitment.
What can help you encourage diversity in content marketing is:
- Avoid slang, gender pronouns, local colloquialisms, etc.
- Use images that reflect diversity
- Mention in content different religious events or important dates
- Avoid faith specific greetings in content
8. Get feedback from diverse employees
Your diverse workforce can help you pinpoint your weaknesses and mistakes.
Direct feedback from diverse employees can bring you one step closer to creating a workplace that will attract diverse talent.
The topics you can focus on in an employee survey for diverse employees are:
- Reasons why they left the company (for diverse employees that quit the job)
- Diverse employee’s job satisfaction level
- Diverse employees’ viewpoint on diversity policies
- Changes that will make the work environment more suitable for their needs
- Diverse employees’ opinion on your diversity efforts
- Reasons why they like working for your company
Make the survey anonymous so that employees can speak their minds without hesitation or fear. No matter how open your workplace communication is, anonymity will make the survey more genuine.
Based on the feedback, you can make adjustments and craft job descriptions that will resonate with diverse candidates.
9. Be proactive in the job search
Actively pursue the best diverse talent.
Posting a job ad is a valid recruitment strategy, but why stop there? Take action and start looking for the best of the best.
One way of getting more involved in diverse recruitment is by asking your best diverse employees for a recommendation. They might know someone with a similar background who would be perfect for the new job position.
You can also reach out to diverse schools and community groups for diverse individuals and offer internship and co-op positions. Some companies have already adopted this tactic and have created internal diversity internships programs.
10. Use ATS to automate your shortlisting
Aside from eliminating the tedious manual shortlisting process, ATS can eliminate biased recruiting from your company.
Intelligent shortlisting software known as ATS will use the set criteria to draw out the top choices. Since the software is objective and only considers relevant experiences and skills, the recruitment will be completely impartial.
The ATS will help you reduce issues such as accidental discrimination or unconscious biases.
Final Thoughts
Transforming your diversity recruitment strategy isn’t a change that can happen overnight.
You need to invest a lot of effort and time to create a workplace community that supports diversity. However, every moment you invest in this process will be rewarded as you’ll end up with satisfied, unique, and productive employees.
| About the Author – Helene Cue is a writer, editor, and career counselor. She has an MBA in business and marketing, and she expands her knowledge by attending conferences and taking courses in career counseling. In addition, Helene also works as a contributor writer for term paper service in the dissertation discussion section. Her passion is helping businesses establish effective strategies to achieve success. |