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Diversity recruiting in 2021: Strategies and Benefits

Everyone is special. Exactly these differences make each of us unique. Diversity and acceptance are what we need not only in our lives but in business as well. If the company hires diverse people with various interests and points of view, it creates a welcoming environment where everyone can express their thoughts and feel welcomed. That’s how great ideas are being born. If you want to implement diversity in recruiting, keep reading our article to learn more about this hiring strategy.

What is diversity recruitment, and why it does matter

So what is diversity recruitment? Simply speaking, it’s a hiring strategy that includes the active sourcing of candidates with diverse backgrounds, ages, races, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and other personal traits. These characteristics have nothing to do with the job performance itself, so they shouldn’t influence the process of hiring and the attitude towards the candidate itself. Diversity recruiting is divided into two categories:

  • Inherent diversity: demographic characteristics like race, sex, and age.
  • Acquired diversity: factors such as education, experience, values, skills, and knowledge.

When the company includes both of these diversity types in its business strategy, it gets an opportunity to connect with people regardless of their non-job-related traits and compete globally. Other benefits  of diversity recruiting are:

  • Variety in talents and exchange of skills and experience among workers
  • Fresh, new ideas and increase of creativity in the company
  • Multiple perspectives and worldviews and, therefore, more innovation in business processes
  • More diverse solutions and faster problem-solving
  • Reduced employee turnover
  • Employees feel included, and that’s why they are more engaged and happier in their workplace

Nowadays, companies spend significant amounts of money recruiting, training, and developing their employees. Hence, it’s not surprising that among some of their top priorities is retaining and developing diverse talent.

Our goal is to be the world’s best bank, in terms of the value we represent and the innovativeness of the products we offer. Having a diverse workforce is very important to our strategy. It allows us to capture new clients and address the needs of our existing businesses.

Niki Kesglou, head of diversity and inclusion, Asia Pacific, Credit Su

Let’s see how diversity in recruiting has gained more popularity in recent years.

Diversity and inclusion recruiting 2021: How things have changed

Let’s start with some statistics about diversity recruiting strategy. According to HBR, diversity drives innovations. Diverse companies are significantly better positioned, 70% more, to capture new markets. Why is it so? 

The reason is that diversity unlocks innovation by creating an environment with sustainability definition where “outside the box” ideas are respected. For example, if you work with people from other countries, you start to appreciate cultural differences and adjust your company services to the needs of people from different countries. The same goes for genders. Gender-diverse companies are 15% more likely to have higher performance because they have more chances to attract top talents and improve their customer orientation, employee satisfaction, and decision making.

When it comes to racial diversity, in 2020, companies have faced major cultural shifts. The protests against the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, Elijah McClain, and other Black Americans revealed the truth about racism in the world and made companies address bias and discrimination. 

Also, Covid-19 has left a big trace in the issues of diversity and inclusion recruiting. According to Carsey, job loss related to the pandemic has disproportionately affected Black and Latinx workers, with 11.5% of Black workers experiencing job loss and 12.3% of Latinxs, compared with 7.5% of white workers who lost their jobs.

That’s why, to make the recruiting processes competitive, diversity recruiters need to prioritize Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in the workplace.  

Diversity Recruiting Strategy: Where to start

Let’s look at the common recruiting strategies you can implement to build a friendly and diverse environment in the company.

Extend your recruiting channels

If you always look for candidates in the same places, you limit your choice and most likely reach the same types of people. Don’t be afraid to consider special diversity job boards and social media to reach a broad demographic. For example, you can find niche forums or online groups where women working in IT hang out. You will reach a talent pool of different candidates and won’t limit yourself in such a way.

Show diverse employees on your careers website

Show, don’t tell. If you want others to think of your company as a diverse one, use content showcasing this diversity. If you only start and don’t have much of it, you can describe on your website what exactly you do to hire diverse people and how you create a friendly, diverse, and inclusive environment in your company. 

So feature a diverse range of your employees in your imagery, videos, and story coverage. Then demonstrate this diversity by who you include on the interview panel and recruitment process.

Gabriella Goddard, Brainsparker Leadership Academy

Create an employee referral program

What can be a better way to find diverse employees than to cooperate with their friends? Word of mouth is one of the best strategies that spread the word about your company and community. The most important part here is communicating your values to other employees so they couldn’t resist but share them with their network. 

The main advice here is to start building a diverse-welcoming culture in the company before actually hiring. For example, companies can start by having gender-inclusive restrooms and spaces accommodating differently-abled talent, reviewing their anti-discrimination policies, and building equitable hiring and promotion processes.

Use AI recruiting to reduce unconscious bias

The traditional hiring process can be riddled with implicit bias. AI recruitment is one of the best ways to overcome prejudice in resume parsing.

AI can be used to support the recruiting for diversity process by analyzing the characteristics of their employees such as gender and ethnicity. Subsequently, AI could be then be used to fill in the gaps, thereby creating a more diverse and fairer workplace.

Mojo Mortgages, CEO Richard Hayes

AI helps reduce biases in the following ways:

  • Recruiting AI sources and screens candidates by using large amounts of data that the human brain can’t process
  • AI can ignore demographic information about candidates

Let’s take a look at the AI recruitment tool - ​​MatchMiner. It helps accelerate applicant communication and conversion with conversational AI. Mya Recruit identifies best-fit candidates and schedules interviews with them. It supports three application paths: message to apply, career site/job board, and Facebook Ad, and engages applicants via SMS, web chat, or Facebook Messenger.

Another example of diversity recruitment software is Talenya - a diversity talent acquisition tool that eliminates bias and increases workforce diversity. Talenya's Talent AI understands your job description and which skills are important. It looks for the right talent, regardless of their job titles, because it understands that there can be many job titles for qualified candidates. It also recommends specific changes to job requirements that are likely to increase diverse talent participation in recruiting pipelines.

Diversity recruiting guide for 2021: Step-by-step guide

These steps will help you implement a diverse recruiting strategy in your company as fast as possible.

  • Make sure that the executive leadership team is fully involved in nurturing a diverse culture in the company
  • Include information about your activities related to diverse recruiting everywhere: on your website, in your job descriptions, social media, and all internal and external communications
  • Constantly research new audiences and recruitment channels and don’t stick to the same platforms
  • Provide bias training in your company to help employees recognize their unconscious prejudice and eliminate it with the help of training programs
  • Use software programs that highlight stereotypically gendered words, and don’t forget about diversity in your job descriptions
  • Develop a flexible working policy to attract different people such as parents, caretakers of elderly parents, those with disabilities and mental health issues, and millennials

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