Diversity Recruitment Best Practices – Reduce the Bias in Hiring

In our previous post on how to not be silent on diversity and inclusion in the workplace, we touched on how many organizations are only paying lip service to D&I issues.

Organizations that are serious about diversity and diversity hiring find it easier to attract top diverse talent due to their more positive employer branding and reputation. Aside from being the socially responsible thing to do, studies have shown that

• 43% of organizations with diverse boards report higher profits.

• Diverse organizations see 2.3 times higher cash flow per employee.

• Organizations that are racially and ethnically diverse are 35% more likely to perform better than those that aren’t.

The benefits go on and on but building a diverse talent pool goes beyond just setting goals and making a few changes to tout social justice.

Here are five (5) proven diversity recruiting strategies to use as inspiration for your own programs from research studies on diversity, unconscious bias, leadership and hiring diverse candidates, and the companies that are getting their diversity recruiting efforts right.

1. Building a diverse talent sourcing pool

Hiring managers need access to a wide array of potential diverse candidates when recruiting. So, it makes sense to look beyond your conventional recruiting pipeline - the one that resulted in your current homogenous employees’ composition.

To build a candidate pool that’s wide enough to feed into

your workforce, you want to look into places where diversity thrives.

Simple things like targeting specific diversity recruitment strategies such as enhancing your recruiting funnel by branding and building relationship with historically black colleges and universities (HCBUs) as well as associations like the National Association of Asian American Professionals, Hispanic and Latino organizations, and Women For Hire, in addition to posting on their job boards. For businesses looking to innovate in a challenging economy, diversity recruiting initiatives linked to HBCUs provide a largely untapped resource of bright, hungry students whose diversity in representation brings diversity of thought which in turn drives innovation.

Companies can partner with their employees to build an employee resource of a targeted database based on personal information such as the educational institutions and associations that the employee graduated from or belongs to for further targeted inclusion programs to attract the desired talent and candidates. By deploying diversity and inclusion strategies focused on places to recruit diverse candidates from, recruiters have a candidate pool to target job boards to market and attract talent, in addition to getting the highly preferred resumes . Increasing diversity among other underrepresented groups will help improve your chances of landing candidates with the qualification and skill set you’re looking for.

2. Leveraging social media to reach more diverse candidates

Hiring teams should learn how to tap into the potential of social media when developing a diverse and inclusive recruitment strategy to incorporate into their talent acquisition process. Implementing socially diverse recruiting strategies help to reach more diverse job seekers during recruiting efforts. LinkedIn and Facebook are great examples of social technology that can help recruiters target a diverse candidate pool, such as female and minority candidates, and resumes from diverse backgrounds.

Employers can easily access a wide pool of diverse candidates considering the abundance of groups with initiatives on social media platforms for underrepresented people.

Social media also makes it easier to target specific candidates with targeted advertising. When organizations are able to create better practices by tying social media with the right diversity hiring strategies, companies will often realize the two are a formula for success. This may also in turn result in the business seeing a boost in their employer’s brand.

Recruiters can easily join an organization or some of these diverse and inclusive groups to ensure the company’s job advertisements reach a diverse audience when recruiting. In addition to participating as a company in various recruiting efforts, companies can show that they are doing more than lip service to improve diversity by ensuring it is implemented not only in diversity recruitment strategy, but also in the recruiter cadence and recruiting process. Moving the dial on your diversity recruitment should also involve making better hiring decisions, which can include the deployment of interview scorecards to standardize the evaluation of candidates in the interview process to put the right talent in the right roles.

3. Leveraging the right tools to support your hiring goals

In our previous post on AI and Recruitment, we touched on how AI technology can be integrated into the hiring process to automate core recruiting processes and help with objective organization decision-making to mitigate unconscious bias in hiring initiatives.

It’s important to recognize that although humans can try to eliminate many of their conscious biases, it can be quite challenging to identify and eliminate many of the other unconscious biases such as ageism, racism, and sexism for example.

Technology can help with this by utilizing data aggregators to compile the most relevant details from across the web into a database, creating candidate profiles with each search. AI sourcing tools create increasingly more intelligent sourcing that helps recruiters and hiring managers find talent faster, find triggers that indicate a candidate's interest, personalize the recruitment process, and capitalize on creating a unique candidate experience that keeps the passive candidate engaged or nurtured. AI Sourcing tools increase team productivity by automating part of the recruiting process.

AI innovation powered psychological assessments can be

used to measure leadership aptitude as well as other desired business, technical, and soft skills that the job requires.