Simple Hiring Strategies to Boost Workplace Diversity

If you’re reading this blog, you’ve already taken your first step! 

Acknowledgment is a critical aspect of workplace diversity and not a lot of companies understand its effect on their business and wider society. Diversity hiring has been in talks for quite a while now, yet, only a handful of companies are taking active measures to adopt inclusive hiring policies and practices. In fact, only 22 companies out of the Fortune 500 have published a full breakdown of their diversity percentage. 

A truly diverse workplace is inclusive of all attributes such as age, race, gender, sexual orientation, abilities, educational background, and more. This helps bring different experiences into the decision-making process that ultimately leads to the creation of new ideas. 

Diversity hiring is not only about supporting multiculturalism, it’s also about growing your business. Studies showcase that diverse businesses are up to 19% more innovative and 43% more profitable. Why not harness this potential? 

Steps to diversify hiring policies and practices

Diversity hiring is not additional to your existing recruitment process; instead, it aims to streamline it better to identify and eliminate any bias. Here’s what you can do. 

Audit Hiring Process

The first step to building an inclusive hiring process is auditing your existing one. Identify various bottlenecks by analyzing your answers to the following questions. 

• How are your managers aligning with your organization’s diversity goals? 
• Do you have a flexible working structure?
• Does your organization’s infrastructure adequately support all groups of employees? 
• Does your brand’s digital presence align with your diversity goals? 
• Do you have an inclusive HR and grievance redressal system? 

All of these aspects are what a candidate looks at when applying for a job. As per Deloitte, 80% of candidates want to work for inclusive organizations; but, before you start the process of hiring candidates, it is also important to address potential concerns they may have. After you have addressed these pain points, we can move on to redefining your hiring process. 

Edit Job Ads

Recruitment ads are a primary aspect of the hiring process. It is imperative they align with your diversity goals. You can start with your past recruitment ads and see what can be edited to make them look more inclusive. You can even include your target demographics to let candidates know you are an inclusive organization that gives everyone a fair chance. Your ads must align with your organization’s actions to support diversity and inclusivity. 

Start At The Source 

Ensuring that your job ads are reaching the right candidate pool is also important. Instead of going back to your regular sources and adopting age-old hiring policies and practices, you must focus on sourcing candidates from various other channels. You can identify your target groups and look for where they are most active. You can find numerous online and offline groups of individuals you are seeking. 

Run internship programs for targeted groups 

Internal diversity programs go a long way in positioning candidates from diverse backgrounds in your organization. Running internship programs or offering co-op positions will enable you to encourage diversity growth and open up new recruitment channels. 

Develop an inclusive ecosystem 

Creating an employer brand is as important as finding the right candidate sourcing channels. The sourcing channels will do you no good if your brand doesn’t appeal to the set of candidates you’re seeking. It’s important to talk about how important diversity is for your organization and what steps you’re taking to boost inclusivity in your structure. It is recommended to highlight your inclusive hiring policies and practices.

Your website, social media, company brochures, or any other form of brand representation should highlight career paths for your diverse employees. Adding first-hand employee reviews on your website and social media platforms will establish trust in job seekers. As per Glassdoor’s D&I Workplace Survey, 66% of candidates trust employee reviews and experiences the most when it comes to understanding how diverse and inclusive the company is. 

You must also work on your company’s hiring policies and make them more appealing to diverse candidates. You may wonder what do these hiring policies include? From simple inclusions like religious holidays to more complex setups like flexible working options, you’ll need to revamp your entire employee hiring policy structure to support your goals. 

Try out these programs 

Businesses are rapidly breaking down global boundaries yet, conscious and unconscious bias is still an influencing factor in recruitment processes. We can actively work on eradicating conscious bias but what about unconscious bias? Well, here are two hiring policy examples that can help you. 

Blind Hiring Program 

Blind hiring entails the removal of all personal information from a candidate’s application. This helps the recruiter make decisions about their candidature based on their skills, experience and other abilities. Any visible indicators such as name, address, language, educational institute, or interests are removed to reduce the chances of unconscious bias affecting their application. 

Building a blind hiring process can be quite challenging since there will be many hiring managers who may not agree with such kinds of applications. At this point, you will be required to make them understand why this process is important. For instance, focusing on only relevant experience for roles may prove beneficial in removing age bias. There may be someone who applies for a sales job but worked as a restaurant server for a couple of years before shifting to a sales profile. His professional experience in sales is what should be the focus instead of his overall experience. 

Once you have the hiring managers on board with the blind hiring process, the next step is implementation. Using an applicant tracking system such as Auzmor Hire will make it significantly easier to streamline the hiring process. 

Build Employee Resource Groups (ERGs)

Organizations looking to nurture an inclusive work culture are increasingly building employee resource groups. It is a perfect hiring policy sample; however, defining the ERG can be a challenge. An ERG must focus on creating a safe space for your employees where they can share their challenges and experiences based on immutable characteristics. 

The structure of an ERG should be pillar-based wherein the pillars focus on all aspects of the organization’s culture and structure, such as business, events, education and learning, community development and more. To further foster accountability, collaboration, and action, you can also launch a company-wide diversity council that monitors the functioning of these ERGs. 

It may seem easy but diversity hiring is a lot more complicated than you may think. Practical application of the steps above is no easy task but we can help you! Auzmor Hire is a perfect platform for your recruitment needs. It offers easy access to world’s leading job boards, collaboration between key stakeholders to remove any bottlenecks from your pipeline, and the ability to efficiently sort candidates while tracking their progress. Get in touch with us to know more!