Why You Need to Diversify Your Hiring Process
Over the past few years, you’ve likely heard about the importance of diversity in the workplace and the various ways your company can benefit from it. You’ve maybe even made some changes within your organization to better promote and increase workplace diversity so your teams become more inclusive, creative, and innovative and achieve better results, but how much have you changed the way you source new talent and fill open positions? If your answer is “not at all” or “very little,” then diversifying your hiring process and recruiting strategy should be a top priority. Doing so will give you access to a much wider pool of talent that can add a broad range of skills and experience to your team, but those are far from the only benefits.
Here, we’ll be going over what a diverse hiring process is, what it looks like in action, and why you need to employ something similar if you haven’t already.
What is a diversified hiring process?
A diversified hiring process is one that strives to ensure certain biases based on a candidate’s age, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, family status, disability, or cultural background have little to no impact throughout any step of the process, whether these biases be for or against any candidates. The hiring process is completely merit-based but structured in a way to give all applicants an equal opportunity, regardless of their background.
A diverse hiring process includes consideration of different backgrounds and identities, even when it comes to how job descriptions are written, where they are posted, where talent is scouted, and how accessible the workplace is.
In short, the main goal of a diversified hiring process or diverse recruitment is to focus on eliminating biases that could prevent qualified candidates from being hired, especially in regard to biases about personal characteristics that have no bearing on job performance.
Examples of diversified hiring processes in action
When looking to increase the diversity of applicants for an open position, organizations with a diverse hiring process may:
- Ensure ads speak to a large audience with plain, straightforward language that can be understood by anyone.
- Try and source candidates from different places rather than relying on the same sources or talent pool over and over again.
- Ask employees to refer their connections.
- Offer internships to specific traditionally underserved or marginalized groups.
- Create company policies that would appeal to diverse candidates.
When screening candidates, an organization that employs a diversified hiring process might:
- Use blind resumes that don’t have a candidate’s name, date of birth, specific locations, or other information that could contribute to a biased assessment.
- Conduct blind interviews, asking candidates text-based questions that can be answered anonymously online or through some other recruiting platform of choice.
- Be constantly questioning what they value most in candidates, why, and whether the answer is based on their own bias.
Why is diversifying your hiring process important?
There are a variety of reasons why you should diversify your hiring process and do everything you can to negate the impact of biases on your staffing needs. Starting with the obvious, eliminating bias from your hiring practices is simply a good moral choice. We can all recognize the negative impact of bias in other aspects of life, and many would consider that reducing the role it plays is the right thing to do.
Diversifying your hiring process can also lead to many of the benefits associated with diversity in the workplace, like increased performance, innovation, and productivity. By now, it should be obvious that there are a lot of benefits to workplace diversity, and diversifying your hiring process is a great way to make your teams more diverse and enjoy these benefits since you should be attracting a wider variety of candidates and making decisions free from bias.
Because of your diverse hiring process and the more diverse workforce that will likely result from it, your business will likely be more appealing to consumers. In fact, research shows when people see diversity in a corporation, they perceive it to be more moral, and this can impact their behavior.