5 Steps to Hire Diverse Talent in 2022

Author: Angela Ash

Building a diverse, inclusive workforce is significant to attracting new talents and retaining the best ones. Many companies have been impacted positively due to diversity hiring. You can do the same. Here are five steps to how a recruitment agency can hire a diverse workforce for its clients.

Before moving into the steps of diversity hiring, here are a few statistics you must go through:

  • Diverse companies experience 2.3 times more cash flow per employee than companies aloof from diversity.

  • 76% of employees consider diversity as an essential factor while considering job offers.

  • For 35% of HR professionals, diversity and inclusion are among the top 5 priorities while recruiting in 2022.

  • Racially and ethically diverse companies outperform less diverse companies by 36%.

Despite many advantages of diversity hiring, it is not implemented in recruitment to its fullest.

  • Women make up only 5.4% of Fortune 500 CEOs. Among these, only 40% are satisfied with their company's decision-making process.

  • 41% of managers do not have enough time to implement diversity hiring initiatives in their company's recruitment process.

  • Men are likely to get hired twice as women, irrespective of the gender of recruiting panel members.

What Is Diversity Hiring?

Diversity hiring refers to recruiting candidates for the company irrespective of differences in their professional or personal characteristics.

Diversity hiring is generally independent of biases related to a candidate's age, sex, gender, economic status, etc., and rather depends entirely on their performance and skillsets.

Using the right strategies, recruiters can overcome unconscious bias to a great extent. These strategies may include utilizing recruitment software for hiring, having diverse interview panels, organizing events to promote diversity, etc.

The benefits of a Diverse Workforce are already clear enough from the statistics mentioned, but here are a few of them:

  1. Increased Creativity: Hiring diversity means opening doors for innovation and creativity. Working together with people of different opinions and characteristics gives insights into various perspectives of the problem and their solutions, which is highly profitable when implementing and strategizing business scaleup.

  2. Increased Productivity: Diverse cultured employees lead to diverse brainstorming, quickly resolving any issue, improving productivity.

  3. Enhanced Performance: Diversity helps employees feel included and appreciated regardless of their differences. This feeling breaks down the barrier between employees and the company; hence, the company's overall performance is skyrocketed.

  4. Improves Competence: A culturally diverse workforce understands and appreciates the requirement and behavior of diverse consumers and can deal with the market of consumer groups of varied demographics.

  5. Building Goodwill: Companies with managed workforce diversity grow goodwill in society. More and more potential candidates seek employment in such companies. Thus, companies are never short on skilled and talented human capital.

Hiring Diverse Talent in Just 5 Steps1. Understand Your Client's Needs and Set SMART Goals

The first step to diversity hiring is to analyze your client's company's present situation. Where does the problem lie? How have those problems affected the workplace?

Next, ponder upon questions like, are there too many males? Do most of the employees belong to the same community? Where is the hiring process lacking? After answering these questions, recruiters can now build a wish list around these problems.

Understanding the strengths and challenges of diversity hiring will give you an overview of the hiring workforce and business model changes.

Your set goals must be achievable and time-bounded. Setting realistic goals can help you set a benchmark to analyze your performance and gradually improve.

Focus on your employer branding and take one step at a time rather than setting broad goals like "involving 100% diversity within the next hiring cycle". This won't help you in your mission.

2. Write an Inclusive Job Description

A job description is something a candidate comes across first while hunting for a job. Biased wordings can influence a candidate's choice of applying to the job.

Studies have shown that the language and tone of the job description affect the decision of candidates to apply or reject the job offer.

Hence, using inclusive terms in job posts is essential. Remember the following tips while writing job specifications:

  • Use gender-neutral language.

  • Separate minimum and preferred prerequisites.

  • Use simple language.

  • Consider broad demographic appeal when writing benefits.

  • Assess a posting for inclusive language.

Many AI tools available in the marketplace can help recruiters create a job description that could appeal to diverse talents. These tools use machine learning and algorithm to help you remove any language that could decrease the advertisement's effectiveness.

3. Create a Fair Assessing Method

Most biased hiring decisions are made at the assessing stage. From candidates' names to the college they attended, biases can be in any form possible.

The few best ways to eliminate these biases from the hiring process are:

  • Blind resume: This technique utilizes tools that hide all the "personal" information of candidates, which could lead to limited selection.

  • Pre-hiring assessment: These are the tests or tasks given to candidates to assess their skills. Candidates are purely judged on their performance in their tests.

  • Utilizing recruitment tools like resume parser can minimize unconscious biases to a great extent.

  • Referrals of an existing employee of a minority group can also stir positive change in your hiring process.

  • Including diversified interviewing panels can lead to better outcomes that fit the opinion of each interviewer.

  • Shuffling interviewers for each hiring stage can also help avoid bias in hiring.

  • Two-in-a-pool process: Your final candidate pool must contain at least two candidates of a minority group. This technique increases the chance of hiring diverse talent.

4. Leverage Technology for Hiring Diverse Talents

The applicant tracking system rules out every possibility of unbiased recruitment by applying an algorithm that ignores candidates' demographic differences.

Though ATS can never be a total replacement for personal engagement, it is the best supporting tool for talent acquisition regardless of background.

An Applicant Tracking System

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  • Sources candidates from different platforms

  • Screens candidates based on skills and attributes

  • Enhances candidate's experience from sourcing to onboarding

    • Also, using Resume Parser can diversify your talent pool and increase your work productivity by multiple folds. This tool utilizes your client's database to analyze the existing employee's skills and experiences and uses the data to evaluate new applicants.

    Through AI proctored interviewing tools, you can sit back and relax while your software evaluates candidates based on their overall performance and gives them a rank. Then, you can further use these ranks to shortlist the top ones for the next stage.

    5. Evaluate Your Diversity Hiring Metrics

    Assess what doesn't work out in your new recruiting framework to know what needs to be adjusted. When assessing your progress, you must not put people in traditional stereotypes, which ultimately makes you ignore their unique traits. Instead, create a list of requirements and stick to it.

    Promote events and campaigns to attract diverse talents. Be active in the diversified community groups to elevate your network. These small changes create a domino effect and positively impact your hiring process.

    Also, communicate with the company's existing employees to understand what more efforts are required to be added from your end. Finally, focus on the company's work culture. Make sure that the employees feel involved and appreciated. This will retain them for a more extended period.

    Diversity Hiring is already on the priority list of many recruiters. Now, It's time for you to implement it as well. It will help your agency in many more ways you can assume.

    Increasing the workforce's diversity is like an investment that demands commitment and willingness to improve. Start by building an impactful employer brand and diverse talent pipeline, and nothing can hinder your agency's success.