Diversity and inclusion in the workplace are a growing concern for companies that seek to improve their culture. We’ve discussed previously how diversity in the workplace is not just a matter of corporate social responsibility or legal compliance.
Having a diverse and inclusive workforce can improve a company’s chance to succeed in a globalised economy. It’s a source of competitive advantage and a key enabler of growth.
Inclusion allows and boosts diversity. Business leaders that want to ensure diversity within their companies need to enable a more inclusive recruitment process. Diverse teams are made of people with different gender, ethnicity, physical ability and disability, education, socioeconomic background, working experience, educational backgrounds, religion, and sexual orientation, among other characteristics.
How can recruiters put in practice efficient diversity and inclusion efforts and eliminate discrimination and unconscious bias to provide opportunities for everyone? First of all, even though recruitment is at the base of a candidate’s first contact with a company, an inclusive company culture has to pre-exist so that new employees have a sense of belonging.
Companies need to foster a truly inclusive company culture in order to be able to assemble a diverse workforce. This means that business leaders need to encourage ongoing inclusion and diversity initiatives across their companies.
Despite a genuine commitment to diversity and the will to create inclusive environments, some initiatives are more effective than others when it comes to attract and keep diverse talent in your company.
To help you develop the best action plan to develop a more inclusive recruitment process we made a list of the best strategies to boost diversity in the workplace:
1. Review Your Corporate Communication to Eliminate Unconscious Bias
Make sure that your marketing and communication materials represent your company’s diversity and inclusion values. Review all existing materials to eliminate unconscious bias (career site, job descriptions and marketing copy) and include clear guidelines on how to communicate diversity and inclusion on your company’s content style guide.
2. Create Diversity and Inclusion Recruitment Policies
The human resources department must advocate for diversity and inclusion and recruiters, in particular, need to act as suppliers of diversity. This means they need to develop the right mindset and take diversity into consideration during the selection process to assemble a diverse and inclusive talent shortlist for the final interview stage. Recruit people from various sources and drive and evidence-based recruitment process to boost diversity hiring.
3. Make Sure Your Team Knows What it Means to Recruit a Diverse Workforce
Senior level hiring managers need to ensure that their recruiters don’t limit their attention to gender or ethnicity diversity. Diversity and inclusion go way beyond: education, thought, experience or disability.
4. Provide Supervision and Support to Your Recruiting Team
Business leaders and hiring managers should follow-up on recruiters, assess ongoing recruitment processes and provide feedback regarding their diversity and inclusion efforts. It’s very important to establish to which extent recruiters should prioritise a diversity requirement in detriment of a candidate's experience or overall fitness and help them make the best decisions.
5. Use Recruitment Technology That Helps Eliminating Unconscious Bias
Driving a modern and effective recruitment process requires you to digitalise and streamline your recruitment process. Using a a recruitment software powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) not only helps you go through the initial steps of the recruitment process faster but also helps you remove the recruiters’ unconscious bias from the equation. Nevertheless, recruiters will still be part of the selection process after the initial automatic matching of the candidates against the job requirements. Therefore, you should also invest in training programs for recruiters and hiring managers, so they learn to identify and manage unconscious bias.
6. Assemble a Diverse and Inclusive Recruiting Team
Having a team of recruiters with the same experience background and that think alike won’t do much for your diversity and inclusion goals. The best way to ensure a more diverse and inclusive recruitment process is to have a diverse group of people involved in the decision-making process.
Skeeled offers you the perfect opportunity to bring innovation and digitalisation to your hiring. Check our website or our LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook pages for further information.
Thanks for reading and see you next time!
Your team here at skeeled
