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Diversity is a key tenet for companies in a world that demands it. There are many benefits of a diverse workforce, from improving team relationships to encouraging innovation and improving decision-making.
But despite the benefits of a diverse workforce, companies still struggle to source and retain diverse talent. For example, in the U.S. tech industry, only 4.4% of software engineers are Black. And only 22% are women.
To ensure you sourcing underrepresented talent, try different strategies to find what works for you. In this post, we’ll share 13 tips to help you source diverse talent.
Let’s dive in.
1. Expand your sourcing net
Go to the places your underrepresented talent groups are in the majority. Along with contacting schools like Latinx-Serving Institutions and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), search for organizations that work to support the diverse groups you want to reach.
Here are some examples:
- Noirefy: A platform that connects diverse talent and corporations for career opportunities.
- Women who code: The largest community that helps women in tech.
- Jopwell: A platform that empowers underrepresented students and professionals to successfully advance in their careers.
- Out & Equal: A global non-profit organization that aims to achieve workplace equality.
- National Association of Black Accountants: An organization dedicated to helping Black professionals in finance, accounting, and related business professions.
- Association of Latino Professionals for America: ALPFA empowers Latino men and women as leaders and prepares them for the global work economy.
After searching some of the above organizations:
- go to Linkedin and look for more groups related to them
- advertise your job openings on diversity job boards
- partner with local universities and colleges to find potential diverse employees
- create relationships with associations in your industry that work to empower historically marginalized members
2. Use inclusive language in your job posts
The language you use in your job posts encourages or discourages prospective diverse candidates from applying. Inclusive language is key to sourcing more underrepresented talent from a broad range of backgrounds.
Examine your job descriptions to know if they target a specific demographic, then assess ways to change the language to include more prospective candidates from a diverse range of experiences and backgrounds.
For example, a report from Linkedin shows that women apply for 20% fewer jobs than men because they feel they need to be 100% qualified. If your diversity goal is to recruit more women employees, adjust your job ad language to make them more appealing to women.
To ensure the language in your job description is free from bias, use a tool like Ongig’s Text Analyzer to help you write bias-free job descriptions. The tool can detect biases like disability, gender, LGBTQ+, race, and ethnicity bias that can prevent diverse candidates from applying.
3. Create a specific candidate persona
Diverse sourcing relies on intentional techniques, not blind hiring strategies. The key to knowing how to source underrepresented talent depends on you and your hiring team’s ability to empathize with diverse candidates’ needs.
Aim to understand their priorities, preferences, and needs — and use those insights to build candidate personas.
Build a persona for different types of candidates with distinct backgrounds for key roles. Include details about what your candidates need from their ideal employer (including benefits), the recruiting process, the type of communication they want, career growth, and any other details to help you identify and connect with more underrepresented groups.
And, while creating your profile, be clear on the areas where you’re lacking diversity and put your sourcing efforts there. For example, saying, “We need to increase diversity in our design team,” is broad for a candidate persona. Instead, say, “We’re underrepresented for LGBTQ+ employees in our design team.”
Through the lens of the second statement, you’ll likely ask yourself, “Where does a designer who identifies as LQBTQ+ feel supported while networking.” And that will lead you to search for organizations that support LGBTQ+ talent at work. This strategy will make it easy for you to source for that specific underrepresented group.
4. Build a diverse interview panel
A diverse interview panel ensures your underrepresented candidates feel comfortable during the interview process by seeing people who look like them. It ensures that you get different perspectives about the candidates. And according to a Greenhouse survey, 68% of candidates believe that a diverse interview panel is important for better talent acquisition outcomes.
To build an effective diverse interview panel, follow these steps:
- Set up the panel for success by defining their specific individual roles. For example, panelist A can assess the candidates’ skills, and panelist B can assess the candidate’s ability to work with a team.
- Ensure there’s inclusivity by considering the race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, education, and disability of the interviewers.
- Add willing employees as interviewers and train them on how to conduct interviews.
- Then collect feedback from your candidates to measure the success of your diverse interview panels.
- From the feedback, evaluate where you can improve.
This step will help you source and hire qualified diverse candidates with ease.
5. Equip managers with skills to source candidates
Hiring managers don’t have to do the sourcing alone. Let other leaders from different departments learn about your sourcing initiatives for underrepresented groups. And tell them how to reach out to potential diverse candidates.
For example, if a manager from your organization’s design department is at a conference, they may mention to someone they meet that they’re looking to add more Black or Latinx women to their team. This may encourage someone at the conference to apply or share your role with someone they know.
This also sends the message that your company values diversity and inclusion. And employees are currently looking to work for companies that value diversity, this will make your sourcing efforts easier.
And you should assume managers don’t know the right language to use, so train them on what is most inclusive. For example, teach them not to use words like strong, competitive, and ambitious because they may keep female candidates from applying.
6. Ask for referrals from your ERGs (employee resource groups)
Before you start sourcing outside, consider how you can get help from the talent in your organization. Employee referrals are a powerful way to source potential underrepresented talent.
And the best employees to get referrals for diverse talent are those from employee resource groups (ERGs) in your organization. To get the ideal referrals from ERGs, do this:
- Start by attending some ERG activities, for example, their lunch activities and team-building sessions. This will help you create a sincere relationship with the members.
- Tell the members about your diversity goals and what you want to achieve at the end of the year.
- Be specific with them about the departments you want to fill. For example, you can say, “We want to hire more Black and Latino women for our engineering team.”
- Let them know you’re welcome to referrals from them. You can even offer referral bonuses.
By leveraging the power of ERGs, you can also find events and conferences where the underrepresented groups hang out a lot.
7. Train recruiters on unconscious bias
Sourcing underrepresented candidates isn’t enough, you need to know how many of them are passing through the interview stage. One factor that can lead to diverse candidates not being hired is the unconscious bias of recruiters.
A 2018 Linkedin study on recruiters found that 42% of hiring managers felt that interviewer bias was a big problem in efficient hiring. This means you have to be intentional and thoughtful to know how to handle interviewer bias.
There are many strategies you can use to reduce interviewer bias like:
- Offer interviewer training so your recruiters are aware of the different types of unconscious bias.
- Use an interview guide as a tool for how your organization does interviews.
- De-personalize your applicants’ resumes by removing personal information about them like the school they went to, their full names, email, race, ethnicity, gender, and nationality.
- Teach your recruiters to reduce niceties during the interview. This is because personal questions during the interview may bring “stereotype or similar-to-me bias”.
By using the above strategies, you’ll be sure your interviewers know how to identify and prevent their unconscious bias.
8. Enable remote work
Depending on the location of your company, you may not have access to diverse talent. Moreover, requiring your candidates to reside in a specific geographical region and report to the office daily can prevent well-qualified underrepresented candidates from applying for your job.
For example, in San Francisco, only 5.2% of the population is Black, compared to 13.4% of the United States population as a whole.
Opening up your company to remote work will allow you access to a large pool of diverse candidates from more backgrounds. This allows you to get a lot of underrepresented talent that you would have never found in your local area.
Plus, this allows you to support working parents who may need flexibility in their workdays. And also give a chance to employees with disabilities to work from home without having to deal with the stress of commuting from home to the office.
9. Attend Diversity-Centric Career Fairs and Events
Diversity-centric career events and fairs build connections between employers and candidates from diverse backgrounds. As a recruiter, you get to engage with many job seekers from underrepresented groups who are not usually accessible through conventional job fairs. Meeting candidates face-to-face allows you to better understand their backgrounds, skills, and career aspirations, so it’s easier to build rapport than online interactions alone.
Participating in these events helps promote your company as an inclusive employer, attracting top candidates who seek companies that support diversity. These events also provide networking opportunities among professionals and community leaders that can result in long-term partnerships and a steady pipeline of diverse talent.
To start, check out these diversity career fairs and networking events:
- National Black MBA Association Conference and Career Expo – premier business organization serving Black professionals
- Women in Tech Conference – strives to empower women in tech through leadership development, professional growth, and mentorship programs. It is one of the world’s leading communities for women in tech companies, with more than 8,000 Global Ambassadors representing 172 countries.
- Reaching Out (ROMBA) Conference – the world’s largest gathering of LGBTQ+ business students and alumni. The event includes a variety of panels, workshops, receptions, and a career fair with 100 corporate partners across industries recruiting LGBTQ+ MBA talent.
- DiversityX – connects Black Americans, Latinx, Asian Americans, Native Americans, women, people with disabilities, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community with top companies.
- RecruitMilitary – tap into the extensive talent pool that veterans
10. Adopt Inclusive Hiring Practices
Inclusive hiring practices create a recruitment process that attracts and employs underrepresented minorities. More than avoiding discrimination, they focus on actively removing obstacles that hinder diverse but qualified candidates from being successful.
Here are some practices and examples of inclusive recruitment strategies:
- Use blind recruitment tools that mask out candidate information like their name, gender, and age, like anonymous resume screening software, blind interview platforms, AI-powered screening and matching tools
- Implement structured interviews that use standardized questions. This allows for a more objective comparison between candidates. It ensures all candidates are assessed equally and that a more informed and fair hiring decision is reached.
- Evaluate candidates with skills-based assessment platforms to measure and test job seeker’s knowledge and performances through skills-based tests or challenges.
To illustrate diversity hiring practices, here are some examples:
- A company partners with a disability advocacy institution or association to identify and recruit qualified candidates with disabilities.
- A tech company focuses on creating a more inclusive interview process by offering coding challenges instead of relying solely on resumes and traditional interviews.
- A marketing agency creates a diverse interview panel to evaluate candidates, ensuring different perspectives are considered during the selection process.
11. Diversity-Focused Internships and Apprenticeships
Internships and apprenticeships that cater to minority groups allow companies to engage with diverse talent early in their careers. They can help organizations develop a more diverse talent pipeline of future employees who are already familiar with the company culture and business practices. These programs often include mentorship components, which provide additional support and guidance to participants, increasing their chances of success within the company.
Apprenticeships also help candidate build skills needed for their professional development.
Successful internship programs usually result in full-time employment offers, reducing costs and time spent on external hiring.
You must have the right leaders and coordinators for a successful diversity-focused internship program. They must:
- Establish a clear mission and goals. Be specific about the expectations for both participants and mentors
- Work with hiring manager and company leaders to discuss workforce gaps that interns could fill
- Collaborate with your L&D team to identify or develop learning materials, technology, and resources to supplement hands-on apprenticeship training.
- To gain organizational support, promote your internship initiative via the company’s newsletters, intranet, or communication channels like Slack. This might encourage more employees to join as mentors.
- At the end of the apprenticeship, ask participants and mentors how they find the program. Identify areas that are doing well and need improvement, and make adjustments for future apprenticeships.
12. Promote a Diverse and Inclusive Workplace Culture
An inclusive workplace culture is more appealing to a broader range of candidates. Potential candidates from underrepresented backgrounds are more likely to apply to companies where they feel they will be respected and valued and have a sense of belonging.
Moreover, an inclusive culture helps attract talent and retain and develop it. Underrepresented employees who feel included are more likely to stay loyal to and grow with the company, reducing turnover and creating a stable and more diverse workforce.
Here are some ways companies can foster an inclusive workplace
- Showcase your company’s commitment to diversity and inclusion on your website and social media.
- Offer inclusive policies and employee benefits that address diverse needs like mental health support, accommodations for people with disabilities, flexible working arrangements, parental leaves, and floating holidays.
- Provide regular D&I training for all employees. In addition to unconscious bias training, programs should be offered to develop cultural competency, inclusive leadership, skills-based training, microaggressions training, and anti-harassment and discrimination training.
- Celebrate diversity through company events and awareness campaigns
- Encourage open dialogue and provide safe spaces for employees to share their experiences and concern
13. Measure and Improve
Track your progress to determine whether your strategies are working. Check your software’s diversity analytics to identify areas where bias might be present and address them. Was there an increase in the number of diverse candidates hired? What about the number of diverse employees retained year by year? How about the number of diverse employees promoted to higher positions?
Set clear DEI goals and regularly measure them against your actual performance. Hold leaders and managers accountable for the diversity results. Conduct regular surveys to understand the experiences of diverse employees and work on improving them. Provide ongoing training for your employees to address the gaps.
Continuously review and update D&I policies and practices to ensure they remain effective and relevant. Stay updated with the latest best practices in diversity and inclusion.
WHY I WROTE THIS
Ongig’s mission is to support your commitment to writing inclusive job descriptions with our Text Analyzer software. Please book a demo today to learn how you can find and remove bias from your hiring process.
SHOUT-OUTS
- 20 Benefits of Having a Diverse Workforce (by Indeed)
- Types of Interviewing Bias and How to Minimize them (by Indeed)
- Software Engineer Demographics and Statistics in the US (by Zippia)
- Candidate Interview and Employer Brand Report (by Greenhouse)
- New Report: Women Apply to Fewer Jobs than Men but are likely to get Hired (by Linkedin)
- How Candidate Personas Should Shape Recruiting Conversations (by Brazen)
- What are Employee Resource Groups? (by Greate Place To Work)
- The 4 Trends Changing how you Hire in 2018 and Beyond (by Linkedin)
- Quick Facts, San Francisco City, California; United States (by U.S Census)
