What is diversity recruiting?

Diversity in the workplace is the idea that your team should reflect the general
makeup of the society around you. Your staff should consist of a variety of
different types of people, from different backgrounds and experiences. This can
include diversity in regard to gender, experience, socio-economic levels, race,
religion, sexual orientation, and so on.

Diversity can fall into two categories: inherent diversity, such as demographic
factors or acquired diversity, which are developed or earned over time. Think of
inherent diversity as being tied to race, gender, age, and any other characteristic
that is natural to who someone is as a person. Acquired diversity refers to things
like education, experience, values, skills, and knowledge, which are more fluid and
can develop and evolve over time.

Diversity recruiting is the practice of hiring candidates using a process that is free
from biases for or against any individual or group of candidates. It is still merit-
based recruitment and still aims to find the best possible candidate, but it’s
structured to give all applicants, regardless of background, an equal opportunity.

Why is a diversity recruiting strategy important?

Workforce diversity is a fast-growing trend in the business world and with good
reason. In addition to being a good moral choice, diversity recruiting also
provides many tangible benefits for performance, innovation, and
productivity. Some of the known perks include:

 A broader range of skills and experience on your team;

 Increased language and cultural awareness;
 Larger and more varied candidate pools;
Because of these perks, it has been proven that diverse workforces are better at
solving problems, avoids “echo chamber” or confirmation bias mentalities much
more effectively, and drive better creativity and innovation at work. This results in
better decisions and results overall. Diversity in viewpoints allows team members
to debate the merits of different methods and come to the best possible conclusion
using a much wider range of information.

The results speak for themselves:

 Companies with diverse management teams have 19% higher revenues.

 Diverse companies are 1.7 times more likely to be innovation leaders in their
market segments.
 67% of job seekers say diversity is an important factor when considering a
company.
 85% of CEOs say that having a diverse workforce improved their bottom
lines.

As you can see, having a strong recruiting strategy for diversity is a sure-fire way
to improve your team’s performance and drive innovation in your industry.

Now that we’ve looked at the benefits, let’s dive into how to recruit for a diverse
workforce.

12 ways to recruit for a diverse workforce

As always, when attempting to improve a part of your business, it’s important to

ask yourself two questions:

 What’s my goal?
 How do I measure success?

Without clearly laying out these two important variables, it’s difficult to
successfully improve your recruiting strategy for diversity.

Sit down with your team and identify what it is that you want to achieve. Do you
want to hire more women into technical roles? Great! Gather the exact metrics
around how many women you currently employ in those roles, and set a goal of
how much you want that to increase by.

Now that you have your goals and metrics in mind, let’s jump into how to improve
your diversity recruiting.

Increasing diversity in sourcing

A great way to ensure that you’re hiring a diverse range of people is to make sure
there’s diversity in who is applying to your positions to begin with. Here are some
techniques for increasing diversity in your candidate sourcing:

1. Audit your job ads

One of the best ways to recruit diverse candidates is to do an audit of your

past recruitment ads, and make changes to speak to a broader range of candidates.
You may notice that some of the languages you use are more geared toward a
specific demographic of experience level. If this is the case, find ways to be more
inclusive in your language to appeal to candidates from different backgrounds.

Don’t be afraid to write job ads with specific demographics in mind in order to
boost your diversity recruiting strategy. Let your target candidates know that
you’re seeking them out, and explain why your company would make a great fit.
2. Target sources where diverse candidates congregate

A great way to ensure that your talent pool is full of diverse candidates is to source
your candidates from a variety of different places. Don’t rely on the same sources
over and over again when seeking out new candidates. Focussing on only the
sources that you know best can result in a talent pool of similar candidates and a
lack of diversity.

Instead, seek out opportunities to source diverse candidates where they typically
hang out. For example, there are many online and offline groups dedicated to
women in technology. This could be a great source to meet and connect with high
caliber female candidates directly, instead of waiting for them to find you through
platforms like Indeed. The more you take the initiative to find these channels, the
more likely it is that your talent pools will be diverse.

3. Encourage your diverse employees to refer their connections

It’s very likely that members of your team will have networks of people with
similar backgrounds to them. Creating a diverse candidate referral program is a
great way to both boost your diversity recruitment strategy, and showcase that your
company values different backgrounds and ideas.

If you are looking to hire more of a specific group of people, reach out to some of
the employees already on your team who are part of that demographic. Encourage
them to share your job ads with their networks, and give them the tools they need
to promote the company for you. Your employees and candidates will both feel
that your company values their opinions and presence, which is fantastic for
overall team morale and engagement.

4. Offer internships to targeted groups

Many companies have started internal diversity programs that offer internship and
co-op positions to candidates from specific backgrounds. This is a great way to
encourage up and coming candidates in your industry to join your team and get
experience.

To accomplish this, reach out to schools and community groups in your area to
determine opportunities to make connections with students. Often, communities
will have their own programs to encourage growth, and teaming up with those
initiatives is a great way to give back while also benefiting from new and diverse
talent.

5. Develop an employer brand that showcases your diversity

Perhaps the best way to boost diversity in your candidate sourcing is to

organically create an employer brand that values people and opinions from all
walks of life. Talk about the benefits and importance of diversity with your team,
get their buy in and engrain those values into your company culture.

As you do this, you will begin to develop an employer brand that is known for
valuing diversity. Encourage employees to talk about this part of your business.
Record their stories, and incorporate that part of your corporate personality into
how you promote your employer brand. Diverse candidates will seek out
companies who truly value those ideals, and developing organically is the only
way to truly reap those benefits.

6. Create company policies that appeal to diverse candidates

It’s one thing to claim that you value diverse recruiting strategies and teams, but
it’s quite another to actually live those values daily. That’s why it’s so important to
proactively implement company policies that appeal to diverse candidates.
Consider changing your time off and scheduling policies to include more religious
holidays, community events, and so on. Encourage flexible work hours that will
allow candidates to continue being involved with their communities, and not
require them to conform to a cookie-cutter schedule at all times.

It’s also important for management teams to encourage employees to speak up if

they think certain policies are hindering diversity in any way. People’s individual
biases will always be a factor in how they perceive and navigate the workplace, so
it’s important to encourage open and honest dialogue to ensure everyone feels
welcome.

Having these policies in place, and actively promoting them in your sourcing, is a
great way to ensure your diversity recruiting strategy is running as it should be.

Increasing diversity in candidate screening

If you find that your diversity recruiting strategy is bringing in a nice variety of
candidates, but you’re struggling to eliminate bias in how you screen them, then
you should consider some of these tactics.

7. Use blind resumes

An increasingly popular technique recruiters are using to remove bias from how
they screen candidates is to “black out” any and all personal information on
resumes. Information like names, schools, date of birth, specific locations, and so
on can all contribute to some degree in a biased assessment of the candidate, even
if it’s not done consciously.

8. Use blind interviews

Blind interviews use the same principle as blacking out resumes to reduce bias, but
apply this tactic to early conversations with the candidate. They can be
accomplished by sending candidates text-based questions via text, or through your
recruitment platform of choice. Candidates answer these questions anonymously
and are asked to avoid providing personal information.

The goal here is to remain free of bias regarding who you choose to interview
further. Obviously, it’s much tougher to remove all personality and bias when
talking to candidates on the phone or in person, so blind interviews are most
effective early in the process.

9. Harness AI to review resumes

One way to ensure that you remove bias from your resume screening process
entirely is to leverage artificial intelligence technology in your ATS. Pre-program
your platform to flag and filter for specific skills and experience, and let the AI
technology analyze your candidate resumes for those parameters. This will provide
you with a completely impartial shortlist, free from any sort of bias.

10. Rethink the factors that you screen for

This tactic relates back to your job ads audit where you rethought what you look
for in a candidate, and how you talk to them. A critical part of diversity recruiting
is to always be questioning what traits you value most in candidates, why, and
whether that’s based on your own bias.

Take the time to look at how you’re testing and screening candidates, and honestly
ask yourself if you’re steering the results towards specific types of people. If you
are, consider changing your testing methods. If you’re not sure, ask some of your
peers to get a diverse range of opinions.
Increasing diversity in shortlisting and hiring

Deciding who to shortlist and hire can be the hardest part of the diversity recruiting
strategy. That’s because you will have a pretty good idea of who each candidate is,
meaning your own bias will likely creep into the equation. To combat this, here are
a couple of techniques to consider.

11. Automate your shortlisting using an ATS

As mentioned above, your ATS can be used to impartially whittle down your list to
the most high-potential candidates. Use the screening tools included in your ATS
to find candidates with the most potential and the best resume of skills. This
technique allows you to completely remove personal opinions about specific
candidates from the equation, and only focus on information that’s relevant to the
job description. Shortlisting candidates based on certain requirements will help you
move towards increased diversity.

If your talent pool was diverse at the start of the process, then you should have a
nice variety of candidates and backgrounds in your shortlist. If not, then the final
diversity recruiting tactic can come into play.

12. Seed talent pipelines with diverse candidates

It’s been proven that diverse candidates are far less likely to be chosen when they
are the only ones from their demographic represented in a shortlist of candidates.
To combat this decision bias, you can use a diversity recruitment strategy called
“the two in the pool effect.”

The premise here is that having multiple people from the same minority
demographic drastically increases the likelihood that one of them will be hired.
Intentionally seeding your shortlist with a proportionate number of diverse
candidates, therefore, will result in a more even playing field when it comes to
choosing one to hire.

Of course, you’ll only want to seed your shortlist with candidates who are truly
qualified. After all, diversity recruiting is all about hiring the best person,
regardless of their background.