Diversity Recruiting Strategies

Diversity in companies isn’t just important from an ethical standpoint, it’s important for the bottom line. A diversity of backgrounds, ethnicities, nationalities, viewpoints, genders and experiences will always lead to stronger results than a monoculture (a company with predominantly one demographic) where everyone shares similar strengths and limitations. If you’re still using diversity recruitment best practices 2017, then it’s time to update your strategies for 2019 and beyond. You can use the strategies in this post to increase the diversity at your company or increase the diversity of candidates you present to clients.

Diversity Recruitment Best Practices

According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), 57% of recruiters report using talent acquisition strategies specifically designed to increase candidate diversity. In 2019, achieving greater diversity in the workplace is no longer just some noble, or compliance-related, pursuit, but a professional necessity both ethically, and as we are learning, professionally. Results have shown time and time again that workplaces with employees from a spread of different backgrounds increase productivity, efficiency, and your ability to hire high quality talent.This is in part due to the team-based structure of modern professional workspaces and the advantages that well rounded teams have in an economy where continuous learning and global business are the norm. Use these best practices as general guidelines for increasing the diversity of your recruiting:

• Emphasize the importance of diversity in backgrounds, ethnicities, nationalities, viewpoints, genders and experiences to all recruiters, interviewers and decision makers.
• Advertise your focus on diversity hiring/recruiting on your company’s or agency's website.
• Collect video testimonials from a diverse range of successful candidates and clients you have worked with (for example, if you are trying to do more business in a country like Korea, then posting local testimonials on your Korean site/social profiles will be essential.)
• Track your diversity hiring efforts so you can improve diversity over time and present diversity data to use as a hiring asset.

Diversity Recruiting Ideas for Your Company

Over the past few years, there has been a race to create and implement new diversity recruiting ideas and there is some debate of what the best diversity recruitment practices are. Whatever your company’s hiring standards are, they need to exist outside of subjective bias and especially outside of prejudice. The ideal hiring model would focus on compiling potential candidates based solely on merit and fit qualifications, thereby eliminating human error resulting from biased/prejudiced hiring decisions. Below is a list of ideas and actionable plans that you can use to help you recruit more talented, diverse candidates for your company or for client companies.

Establish Diversity As Essential To Your Brand

This one is pretty common sense. If you would like to up your company’s profile as a pro-diversity employer, then be sure to include that goal in its brand-voice.

• Include your commitment to diversity in your company’s mission statement, website and other online resources.
• Create a section on your career page specifically dedicated to your approach to diversity.
• Promote diversity hiring images, stories, case studies, resources and statements on social media.

If you are vocal about your commitment to diversity recruitment, you will receive a more diverse group of prospective candidates when hiring for a new position or sourcing candidates for a client.

Partner With Associations That Promote Multi-cultural Communities

There is a broad range of organizations that serve and advocate for people of diverse backgrounds.Student Groups, National Advocacy Programs, and Equality-Focused Non-Profits are all valuable resources when figuring out how to create a recruitment method focused on diversity and sourcing diverse candidates from local communities.A partnership with these groups will help your company have a further reach and greater credibility in underrepresented groups when recruiting.

Live Events To Promote Diversity

Hosting an event that focuses on diversity hiring is a high-impact method of promoting diverse recruiting. Organize an event onsite if you can, or partner with a local university to throw a diversity fair on-campus. Events like these will allow for face-to-face interactions with a diverse group of interested, prospective, candidates and will help you let the public know your companies commitment to fair and diverse recruiting.One recent example is the US’s first trans job fair, which was attended by 67 companies including Starbucks, Disney, Bank of America and Trader Joe's.

Monitor Diversity Recruiting Efforts With Metrics

To ensure that your company or agency is increasing the diversity of candidates and hires, always track diversity recruiting statistics and set goals for improving on previous diversity recruitment performance. Keep an eye out for:

• Percentage of diverse candidates sourced, interviewed during your hiring process or presented to clients.
• Levels of demographic diversity at different position levels throughout your company.
• Survey data on diversity applicant satisfaction with the hiring process.
• The retention rate of diverse hires.

In the information age, no one really has an excuse to be uninformed about these metrics within their companies, so track these metrics closely so that you can improve diversity at your company or the companies of your clients.Use Automated Sourcing to Eliminate BiasPerhaps the most promising method of effective diversity recruitment is Automated Sourcing. Loxo employs machine learning and AI algorithms to source the most qualified candidates from a pool of perspective based on work-experience, qualifications, and accomplishments, thereby eliminating any potential form of subjective interference.Recruiters for your company can use automated sourcing to plug in the key competencies that you are looking for for a given position, and will be given a list of the most qualified candidates available. Loxo will also keep track of these potential candidates throughout the entire process of interviewing, callbacks, and final deliberations, compiling and keeping track of relevant data in order to facilitate a clean, easy and efficient journey through bringing on new diverse talent.Companies have been asked to step up to the plate and examine their old hiring methods, and update them to accommodate an increasing, and justified, demand for diversity. Companies like Loxo, understand the significance of these changing tides and will be there every step of the way towards a fairer, and more diverse, future. To see how Loxo can give you greater access to a greater diversity of talent, just sign up for a demo here.