5 Tips to Improve Your Diversity Hiring Strategy

Diversity is crucial to tap into a global talent pool of professionals from all backgrounds. If you’re not focusing on inclusive recruiting practices (or making diversity a priority), you’re failing to attract the best and the brightest to your business.

To avoid this mistake and build a diverse workplace that will take your company forward, you need to put a solid diversity hiring strategy in place. 

Here are 5 tips to help you improve your diversity and inclusion hiring strategy.

1. Create Diverse Hiring Goals

The first step to improving your diversity and inclusion hiring strategy is to set clear and measurable hiring goals. This will help you track your progress and identify areas to make improvements. 

For example, you can set a goal to increase the number of underrepresented groups in your company, or you might aim to ensure that all candidates from diverse backgrounds receive equal opportunities during the selection process.

You can get as granular with your goals as you like, but when setting these goals, it’s important to consider factors like:

• the current composition of your workforce
• the industries you are recruiting from
• the demographics of your target candidate pool

A solid understanding of these factors will help you choose the most effective hiring goals for diversity and inclusion by pinpointing specific problems in your company. 

Also, it’s important to review and update your hiring goals regularly to ensure you stay on track (and make progress) toward a more diverse and inclusive workplace.

2. Build a Diverse Hiring Team

Having a diverse hiring team is essential to create an inclusive recruitment process. This includes people from different backgrounds, departments, and levels of seniority — like HR, your diversity and inclusion team, or hiring managers.

Be sure to use a guide to DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) during this process to ensure everyone in your team understands these pillars and how to implement them.

With a diverse hiring team, you can better understand the needs and experiences of underrepresented groups and make your recruitment process inclusive and bias-free. This diversity also helps ensure your job postings and interview process are as inclusive as possible.

When building a diverse hiring team, do it through employee resource groups (ERGs). This creates employee-led teams solely focusing on boosting inclusivity in your organization. ERGs will consider crucial factors like age, gender, race, and background to ensure your hiring strategy encompasses the diverse candidate pool in your industry. 

And, go the extra mile to provide training and resources for your hiring team to help them understand the importance of diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

3. Create Inclusive Job Descriptions

The language you use in job postings is crucial in attracting diverse candidates. Job descriptions can either be your biggest asset or your biggest pitfall, so be careful.

Inclusive job descriptions are free from bias, avoid stereotypes, and are written in a way that appeals to a broad range of job seekers.

If you’re unsure if your current job descriptions are inclusive enough (or contain the right language), you can use Ongig’s Text Analyzer to quickly remove non-inclusive language from all pieces of hiring copy. 

Some of the common mistakes companies make are:

• Using gendered language (e.g., “aggressive” sales mindset)
• Age restrictions (e.g., “recent graduates only”)
• Not including pay transparency in the hiring strategy (some salary info is better than none)
• Using potentially racist language (e.g., “brown bag sessions” or “native English speaker”)
• Using language that discriminates against people with disabilities (e.g., “Walking the warehouse floor” or “Typing internal documents”)
• & more

Avoid using words like “young” or “energetic,” as these words can be perceived as ageist and may discourage older candidates from applying. Ongig’s software flags 12+ types of “exclusionary words” and offers more inclusive replacements (and gender-coded words).

To gain some much-needed perspective on all of this and improve your hiring strategy, it’s important to gauge how your current employees feel about your company culture. 

Are they engaged with your brand? Do they feel appreciated? Create a survey and make sure to ask the right questions. Make sure the answers are anonymous. This will boost honest replies.

You can then use this data to optimize your job descriptions and empower your hiring teams.

4. Use AI to Eliminate Bias

More business leaders (in all sectors) are using artificial intelligence (AI) to automate various processes. You can use AI to improve your hiring process (and eliminate bias) to increase diversity in the workplace.

For example, companies use AI to analyze resumes and identify qualified candidates, regardless of their backgrounds. 

This strategy helps create a more fair selection process for all job seekers. Using AI to eliminate bias ensures all candidates are given equal opportunities and that the recruitment process is transparent. 

It’s also important to note that the right AI tool can help you manage teams with different backgrounds and identify best practices to build a positive company culture. This method is essential when creating your employee-led resource groups.

5. Educate Your Team on Diversity and Inclusivity

Educating your staff on diversity and inclusivity is important so you can welcome new hires into an inclusive work environment and live up to your brand’s promises. This approach includes offering training and resources on best practices to create a more diverse workforce, and promote diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

By investing in employee training and development and educating your staff on these important issues, you can create a workplace culture that is inclusive and welcoming to all. If you don’t have the internal staff to handle this task, bring in consulting educators or invest in inclusivity seminars.

This approach will also spread the message of an inclusive and supportive employer brand and encourage diverse candidates to apply, regardless of their background. 

Why I Wrote This:

Creating or improving an existing diversity and inclusion hiring strategy is the key to attracting top talent. Be sure to use these tips to take your hiring strategy and brand to new heights. And if you want software to support your inclusive JD efforts, please request a demo to learn more.

Shout-outs:

1. 7 Actions HR Can Take to Help Create an Inclusive Environment at Work (by Andrea Boatman)
2. Diversity and inclusion: the complete guide (by Martina Di Gregorio and Rebecca Anderson)
3. What is Employee Training & Development? Learn Here! (by Kyriaki Raouna)
4. Employee Training: Why Companies Should Encourage Employees’ Self-Improvement (by Semos Cloud)
5. 7 Best Practices for Managing Teams With Different Backgrounds (by Anastasia Matvieieva)
6. Employee engagement surveys: A comprehensive guide and examples of questions (by Stefan Debois)
7. Attract & engage top talent by increasing pay transparency (by fetcher)
8. What are employee resource groups (ERGs) (by mentorcliQ)
9. The Step-by-Step Guide to DEI (by Nailted)

This is a guest post from Nikola Sekulić  of Content Wizards:

Nikola is a seasoned brand developer, writer, and storyteller. Over the last decade, he’s worked on various marketing, branding, and copywriting projects – crafting plans and strategies, writing creative online and offline content, and making ideas happen. When he is not working for clients around the world, he is exploring new topics and developing fresh ideas to turn into engaging stories for the online community.

February 17, 2023 by Nikola Sekulic in Diversity and Inclusion