Top 5 Strategies to Improve Diversity in Recruiting

Diversity in recruiting has come a long way. Since employees’ demographics change and international markets develop, company’s diversity moves closer to turning into a corporate requirement in place of a banner that corporations do waive to display their obligation to accepting differences and change. Workers draw tangible and intangible advantages from company, not the minimum of which involves respect and recognition from colleagues and other business benefits.

Undoubtedly, having different backgrounds and perceptions within your team will add to novel and more diversified ideas to help resolve problems and drive creativeness. It’s not a miracle, then, that businesses all over the world are targeting to develop diversity in their recruiting strategy.

Thus, diversity reaches beyond the business outcomes and activities. Diversity is an ethical ground for any business to strive for. Developing teams from qualified candidates irrespective of their gender, background, religion, race or sexual orientation are long overdue, and a step towards offering leveled playing field in the company.

Significance of  Diversity in Recruiting

Employee diversity is a rapidly growing trend in business sector and it is there for fairly good reasons. Besides being a good moral choice, diversity in recruiting also offers many perceptible advantages enhancing performance, innovation, and efficiency. Some of the visible incentives involve:

  • A comprehensive range of qualifications and versatile experience of your team
  • Eclectic language and cultural knowledge
  • Wider and diversified candidate pools

Owing to these incentives, it has been established that diverse employees are more efficient at resolving problems, avoiding conflicts, defying bias driven impulses more efficiently, and driving innovation at the workplace. This brings about overall improved decision making and productive outcomes. Diversity in perceptions enables team members to fairly discuss the merits of improvised methods and reach the optimal decisions utilizing a vast range of available information.

Results tell the tale:

  • 19% higher revenues are generated by companies with diverse management teams.
  • It is 1.7 times more probable for the innovation leaders to belong to diverse companies.
  • According to 67% of jobseekers, diversity is a crucial factor when taking into consideration a company.
  • 85% of CEOs admit that diverse employees on their team have increased the company’s proficiency.

Hence, it has been proven that a strong recruiting strategy for diversity is a reliable technique to increase your team’s performance and drive innovation in your industry. Here are some useful techniques for improving diversity in your candidate sourcing:

Audit Your Job Ads to Bring Diversity In Recruiting

Performing an audit analysis of your past recruitment ads and making changes to address to a large extent of candidates, is one of the best ways to recruit diverse candidates. It may come to your notice that a few of the languages you might have been using are more equipped for a specified demography and experience of candidates. If such is the case, try to be more comprehensive in your language to be attractive enough for candidates from diverse backgrounds. Design and create your job ads considering various demographic facts in order to boost diversity in recruiting. Make sure your target candidates understand that you are looking for them. Moreover, explain how working for your company would be the right choice for them.

Target Eclectic Candidates

An effective way to make certain that your talent pool is full of diverse applicants is to source the candidates from a range of diverse places. Try not to rely on the same old sources again and again when looking for prospective candidates. Concentrating only on the sources that you already know can bring about a talent pool of homogeneous candidates and a lack of diversity.

Rather, look for opportunities to source diverse candidates where they usually socialize. For instance, women in technology are a focal point of many online and offline groups. These groups can prove to be a great source of meeting and connecting with high-caliber female candidates directly. Instead of waiting for them to reach you through platforms e.g. Indeed, take proactive measures to identify such sources and diversify your talent pools.

Encourage Referral Program

There is a high chance that your team members may have networks of people with same backgrounds as themselves. Developing a diverse candidate referral program is an effective approach to enhance your diversity in recruiting strategy. Exhibit that your business acknowledges and appreciates diverse backgrounds and cultural elements.

Are you scrutinizing to recruit more of an explicit group of people? Connect with few of the employees who are already on your team and who are part of such networks. Request them to share your  open positions with their peer groups? Along with tangible incentives, offer them the resources they require to publicize the organization for you. It will be obvious that you value both your employees’ and candidates’ opinions and presence. This is a positive factor for overall team morale and engagement.

Inclusion of AI in Recruiting

Concatenating artificial intelligence to your recruiting software is an effective way of eliminating bias in resume parsing. In order to standardize and screen for particular skills and experience, pre-program your platform, and allow the AI technology to evaluate your applicant resumes against those parameters. This will let you have a complete list of impartially shortlisted candidates, lacking any type of bias.

Automate Shortlisting Process

Your applicant tracking system is a great way to impartially narrow down your list to the most prospective candidates. Utilize the screening tools in your ATS to look for applicants with high caliber and the relevant skill-set, thereby bringing diversity in recruiting. This approach enables you to entirely eliminate personal takes regarding any particular candidate. Shortlisting candidates based on specific requirements can be helpful to move you closer to enhanced diversity.

The bottom line is that diversity in recruiting is one of the core contemporary organizational values. If you need an applicant tracking system that not only offers diversity but other necessary automation in recruiting as well, RecruitBPM is here for you. We also offer free demo so that you can explore and learn more about our working and ecosystem.

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