In recent years, having a diverse team has become more crucial than ever, as extensive representation helps bring various perspectives to your company. Today, most organizations use several recruitment strategies to help ensure that their ranks remain diverse enough to produce fresh thoughts and ideas.
What is a Diversity Recruiting Strategy?
Diversity recruitment strategy centers itself around the concept of hiring a team that mirrors the world around you. Ensuring that your organization has people from various backgrounds, genders, experiences, and so on can help create a space where several ideas can flourish.
This type of recruitment strategy is excellent for organizations that aim to have a broad skillset and more awareness about the thoughts and behaviors of members of their target audience. Unfortunately, diversity recruitment is still hit-and-miss, with many recruiters consistently failing to match their hiring targets.
Fortunately, this does not have to be the case. Today, there are various proven recruitment strategies that you can use to ensure diversity within your ranks.
Various Recruitment Strategies Businesses are Currently Discussing
Developing a Brand Image That Showcases Your Diversity
One of the most common misconceptions in the workplace is that you only need branding for your customers. However, this could not be further from the case. As an employer, your brand must be able to develop an image that shows that it is a welcoming space for a wide range of groups.
This need to develop a positive brand image must also go beyond only creating catchy slogans and impressive copy. Instead, your company must also look to showcase its diversity in various aspects of its brand image, such as using non-gendered language. By employing these strategies, you can meet diverse talent where they are instead of hoping that they come to you.
Audit Your Past Job Ads and Interview Patterns
Unfortunately, many companies today continue to miss out on diverse talent due to poor recruitment ads. In most cases, a glance at some of your older running advertisements may show that the language you used only encourages a particular demographic to apply, which may have discouraged people from other backgrounds to throw their hats into the mix.
If you notice this mistake, we suggest including more inclusive language in your job ads to encourage a better demographic blend. We also recommend switching to blind interview patterns, such as a text-based Q&A session during the early stages of the application process. Adopting this pattern will help ensure your team remains free of bias.
Tracking the Performance of Your Diverse Recruiting
Data must always be your friend when thinking about how to improve diversity recruiting for your company. This need to track your performance is why we always suggest setting goals for your recruitment process.
After each hiring round, you can compare your final cohort against your goals. If you discover that you have fallen a bit short, you may need to go back to the drawing board and brainstorm with your team about why you failed to meet your targets.
Mentoring, Internship, and Affordable Training Programs for New Talents
It is not enough to hit and hope that diversity comes to you. Instead, you must go out and ensure that your company can take in candidates from various backgrounds.
Today, one of the best ways companies have improved their recruiting diversity is by setting up an internal internship or mentoring program that only allows applicants from specific backgrounds. You may also encourage interns and trainees to remain in the company after finishing their program, which helps naturally boost your diversity.
Continuous Development and Adjustments to Your Diverse Recruiting Strategy
Your finger should always remain on the pulse when trying to increase diversity within your company. During recruitment, things may go wrong, and you may end up with few candidates from particular backgrounds.
If you are in this boat, don’t fret. Instead, you and your team should try and think about why you are consistently seeing poor numbers and make slight adjustments to your strategy. For example, you may switch to posting ads on a channel that generally has a more diverse set of users.
Collect Blind Interviews
Although we may want to believe that we are all free from bias, this may not always be true. Unfortunately, our bias tends to happen subconsciously, hurting many skilled applicants. As a recruiter, your core goal should always be to create an environment that makes it challenging for this bias to spring up, and one of the best ways to do this is through blind interviews.
This interview process involves screening candidates through text-based mediums instead of via phone or video calls. Adopting this pattern makes it challenging to attach any personality traits to the applicant and allows us to judge them for who they are rather than who we think they are.
Think about the Possibility of Using Artificial Intelligence in a Variety of Recruiting Strategies
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly becoming one of the most crucial tools in our world. In the recruitment process, AI can also play a strategic role by helping you screen for candidates based on the parameters you set, such as experience. Using this tool to carry out shortlisting should help remove any chances of bias.
Set Up a Safe Space for Your Reserves
It is common to screen various fantastic applicants that are still not good enough to make it into the final cohort. In such cases, you may want to create a reserve list and add them to it, so you can easily reach out to them if an opening becomes available.
If you are going to be doing this, you should try and reach out to the applicant and let them know that you may still contact them in the future. This conversation will help keep them motivated and leave the door open for your next hiring round.
Why Diversity Recruiting is Important? Diversity Pushes Your Business to the Next Level
Diversity is the bedrock of innovation in our society. The more representation in a room, the more viewpoints we can share. By employing these diversity recruitment strategies, your company should gain a bird’s eye view of the various perspectives and chart the right path to success.