What’s a best practice around diversity hiring?
To help you approach diversity hiring with best practices, we asked HR leaders and CEOs this question for their best advice. From auditing job roles to reflect diversity to avoiding misrepresentations in your ads, there are several best practices that you may follow to ensure strong diversity in your hiring efforts.
Here are seven best practices for diversity hiring:
- Audit Job Roles To Reflect Diversity
- Prioritize Stakeholder Alignment
- Let Candidates Show Their Creativity and Uniqueness
- Use Your Employee’s Connections
- Look for Candidates in New Places
- Recruit Year Round
- Avoid Misrepresentations in Your Ads
Audit Job Roles To Reflect Diversity
Diversity hiring should be promoted in the sourcing process itself by auditing the job roles and making changes that diversity demands. The language used shouldn’t be aimed at a specific job location and should be inclusive to ensure that candidates from diverse backgrounds all connect with it. If you feel that there is one culture or geographical location that isn’t present in your organization, don’t hesitate to mention it in the job ads. The ad is what interacts first with the job seeker and if it’s diverse, the hiring would be diverse too. So, start auditing your job roles and make them appealing to everyone.
Caroline Lee, CocoSign
Prioritize Stakeholder Alignment
Achieving success in hiring senior executives means accelerating the road to full productivity and avoiding de-railers. Critical components include a structured model, stakeholder alignment, and a trusted advisor. This is true of all executive hiring, but even more important for diverse and under-represented minorities, especially where organizations have evolving cultures and diversity is a key priority.
It’s an investment that will accelerate the business through attracting and retaining the best talent and mirroring the face of customers and suppliers. Having key stakeholders to include colleagues, HR and those who hold soft power aligned on the positions expectations and awareness of the company and culture the person is coming from are critical factors for fast-tracking executive success. Ensuring the executive can recognize the challenges that current minorities face, unconscious bias that may exist and the role of DEI curriculum are critical for success.
Bill Glenn, Crenshaw Associates
Let Candidates Show Their Creativity and Uniqueness
When recruiting diverse candidates, make sure your application and interview processes allow candidates to show their creativity and uniqueness. It can be time consuming to review portfolios, watch video applications, or visit candidates’ websites, but these things are easy ways for them to highlight their unique talents. Take the extra time to review applications and portfolios manually rather than using an automated system that might inadvertently weed out the best candidates.
Maegan Griffin, Skin Pharm
Use Your Employee’s Connections
You should go ahead and reach out to your employees that represent a demographic you’re after. Ask if they can recommend someone that might fit in. Students, for instance, will surely be more than happy to recommend their colleagues of similar backgrounds who share both their interests and competencies. It’s a win-win scenario. If you allow your employees a chance to help a friend of their demographic to land a job, you show that you value their opinion. Let them promote the company for you. Give them the tools to locate a new team member, and consider throwing in a bonus if the employee delivers. They will be glad to recommend the job and you might find a perfect addition to the team sooner than you’d think.
Maciek Kubiak, PhotoAiD
Look for Candidates in New Places
If you want to prioritize diversity in your hiring process, look for candidates in out of the box places. You can partner with universities and local groups, attend job fairs, or use different kinds of job posting websites. Looking in new places for candidates can increase your chances of finding different kinds of people to hire.
Leo Livshetz, Unhide
Recruit Year Round
Continue to recruit constantly, not only when there are current openings at your company. Establishing a diverse workplace involves a driven, continuous motivation, not one that gets flipped on and off like a lightswitch when a position becomes available. Ensure you are still building connections and learning about new and diverse potential applicants consistently, and you’ll find that, whenever a position does come available, you may have several exceptional, qualified candidates in mind.
Alex Wang, Ember Fund
Avoid Misrepresentations in Your Ads
Job candidates, especially diverse job candidates, are used to being on the lookout for false sincerity. Be careful not to incidentally (or otherwise) use broad marketing tactics to try and attract attention. If your company’s outreach approach puts a lot of diverse images and actors in their media but a quick look on your website shows a predominantly non-diverse workforce, that will be a big red flag. It’s completely possible to be open to diverse hiring without presenting a false image of your company’s current culture. Your policies and worker benefits should reflect your company’s willingness to include diverse hires. Strong inclusive company behaviors have a far greater reach than surface level visual appeal.
Alex Chavarry, Cool Links
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