How to Build Diversity Into Your Recruitment Process

Previously, we looked at what employee wellbeing would look like in 2022 and today, in part 2 of our company culture series, we put the spotlight on diversity in recruitment.

A diverse team helps your company be more innovative and achieve better results. However, most companies’ recruitment process is not allowing them to hire a diverse range of employees so we take a look at how you can build diversity into your recruitment process.

Key Takeaways

1. Building diversity initiatives into your recruitment process can help expand the talent pool
2. Diversity in your company helps you better serve your customer base and delivers better results
3. There are some simple steps you can take to remove bias and increase diversity in your hiring process

When it comes to recruitment, there are four main areas of diversity; gender, ethnicity, religion and disability, and sexual orientation. Diversity in recruitment refers to the process of hiring a wide range of people from these four areas, rather than simply hiring people that fall into the same categories time and time again. For example, diversity in recruitment could mean hiring people with a range of ethnic backgrounds and those with varying sexual orientations.

A lot of people assume that diversity happens naturally, that there is bound to be a diverse group of people applying for the same role. However, this is rarely the case and more often than not, businesses find themselves with a lack of diversity in the workplace. This is why diversity recruitment strategies are key.

Why Diversity is Important in Recruitment

When thinking about why diversity is important in recruitment, a lot of people underestimate the impact a diverse workplace can have on a business. By embracing diversity, you have a larger talent pool to hire from and this opens up a whole host of candidates that may have otherwise been missed. Simply, it helps you to build a team using the best of the best.

Not only does a diverse team bring a whole host of varying skills and experience, but it helps you better serve your customer base. Additionally, a diverse team is one that has different experiences, styles, backgrounds and ideas. This can benefit the business in terms of innovation and creativity.

Key Ways to Ensure Diversity in Recruitment

Write Inclusive Job Adverts

When you are writing a job description, it’s important to clearly reflect the skills needed, as well as the criteria someone needs to meet. However, a lot of job descriptions are written in a way that confuses anyone outside of the company. Rather than using jargon and complex company language, keep things clear and simple. This helps to ensure diversity in recruitment by making sure that people outside of the company, and those who bring something different to the table, have an equal shot at securing the job.

Widen Your Recruitment Pool

By placing your job advertisement on a large recruitment website, you are instantly increasing the number of people that are likely to apply. In turn, this widens your search pool and builds diversity. Instead of limiting applicants to those who apply in a certain way, you are opening the recruitment up to everyone. Instead of simply posting the advertisement on a website, spread the word on social media and start networking with different groups.

Remove Personal Information

During the recruitment process, certain assumptions can be made about someone based on the personal information found on their CV. By removing this, those shortlisting applicants cannot make a judgement based on things such as school, location, date of birth and names. This is one of the main diversity recruitment strategies to use, as it ensures hiring decisions are made solely on the skills and experience of the candidate.

Prepare an Inclusive Interview

Achieving diversity in recruitment requires you to prepare an inclusive interview ahead of time, to ensure every aspect of the interview is as inclusive and diverse as possible. For example, think about the questions you will be asking and how you will score each applicant. Preparing beforehand reduces the chances of a biased decision being made as you can focus on the things that matter, such as allowing candidates to showcase their talents. The goal is to increase the chances of the successful applicant being chosen based on their suitability for the job and not because they fit a certain ‘ideal’ of what you want them to be.

Have a Diverse Hiring Panel

Another way to build diversity into your recruitment process is to have a diverse hiring panel. This can help you to hire the ideal candidate, as you have a wider pool of opinions and questions to use. Plus, it shows candidates that you employ people like them and you are a team made up of lots of different types of people. This can provide a candidate with reassurance and confidence.

Summary

As you can see, there are a number of ways to build diversity into your recruitment process. Diversity in recruitment can be easily achieved when the correct processes are put into place, such as scoring candidates without taking personal information into account and ensuring the hiring team are diverse themselves. Not only does recruitment diversity give candidates an equal chance, but it can benefit the business hugely.

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From writing optimised job descriptions, listing on the top job boards and managing your applicants, ecruit saves you time and money while recruiting the top candidates across your sector.

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Book a 5 minute demo with our team to find out more.