Top 7 Things to Ensure Diversity in Hiring

The talent requirements for businesses have evolved at a pace no one anticipated amidst the continuous competitive heat. Organizations now don’t just need talented employees, but fresh and innovative minds who bring in diversely varying perspectives. Subsequently, diversity hiring is not a ‘nice-to-have’ aspect for companies anymore, it’s not just about positioning yourself as an equal opportunity employer either. Diversity in your workforce has a deep impact on your business – rooted way more significantly than you would believe.

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A report by Mckinsey stated that the top one-fourth of organizations ranked as per diversity in executive teams were 21% more likely to have good profitability than the bottom one-fourth of companies. On the other hand, the bottom companies with not enough gender and ethnic diversity underperform by 29% in profitability. 

Diversity hiring is not a recently emerging subject, it has been in the buzz around for decades now. Wondering why it has not yet been adopted fully into the system? Because businesses tend to see diversity as a numbers problem rather than a radical aspect – which it truly is. 

Another major reason for diversity hiring being downplayed is its long-term nature. You are least likely to see results within a year or two, however, diversity in your workforce will yield greater results than you would even expect.

The need of the hour is not just awareness – we have moved beyond that, it’s rather optimizing the journey. Organizations know how important diversity hiring is, but the execution is missing out. But you don’t need to worry, as you’re already here. We will discuss the ins and outs of implementing diversity hiring and everything surrounding it – stick around for a brief insight!

What is Diversity Hiring?: A Recall

Diversity hiring refers to sourcing and recruiting talent from diverse backgrounds, ensuring an inclusive talent acquisition journey for candidates and eliminating the roadblocks that prevent candidates from having equal opportunity in recruitment. 

No doubt hiring diversity plays a huge role in the culture of your organization, however, it has a broader significance. As a business entity, ensuring diversity in your hiring is your contribution to making society better and aligned with socio-economic balance. 

The idea of diversity is to encompass people from different age groups, genders, ethnicity, cultures, experiences, background values and perspectives. It’s these characteristics that make people truly diverse. The most successful employers have one thing in common – they constantly look for people with innovative thinking and creativity which can be derived from these aspects of diversity.

Contrary to popular opinion, having diversity in your workforce is as important as having the most skilful people working for your organization. Why? Two pathways to answer this question:

• From an organization’s perspective - innovation, creativity, various background experiences and unique thought processes are the primary reasons.
• From a candidate’s perspective - inclusive culture, equal opportunity and meaningful careers draw them toward organizations that value diversity.

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You probably got a birds-eye view of what diversity hiring is, and why is it vital for both ends of recruitment. Let’s take a deep dive into what are the more crucial positives of diversity hiring in the modern recruitment space.

Advantages of Diversity Hiring

There are numerous benefits of introducing diversity hiring for your organization. We discussed companies with higher diversity in their workforce outperforming others and hitting higher profits. How does it happen? What are the tangible advantages of diversity hiring that lead to those prolific results? Let’s find out:

1. Various Perspectives

A diverse workforce with varying backgrounds, views, skills and experiences means your business would involve more perspectives. Each individual’s access point contributes to crucial analysis and decisions for enterprises. Planning, preparing and executing business strategies successfully – requires a multi-dimensional approach which is an outcome of diversity hiring. 

On the other hand, employees in a diverse workplace would grow themselves faster. Having access to a diverse in-office network is often underrated, but works wonders for knowledge transfer company culture. It’s definitely a win-win for both ends!

2. Amplified Creativity

Creativity is a direct function of high exposure and various viewpoints. Diversity ensures your employees approach the same objective in widely differing ways, which exponentially boosts creativity. Add up to that the collaborative power of teams with people from different backgrounds – you get a huge variety of fresh ideas consistently. It should also be kept in mind that the creativity bar, once set high, becomes an inherent trait of an organization. It just stays in the culture and the next batch of talent quickly becomes the flag bearer.

3. Fast and Efficient Problem Solving

Businesses are all about solving problems – you would agree with this. What it further means is that problem-solving capability is the primary skill of any professional. Also, it is one of the priorities for recruiters while evaluating candidates. 

Organizations and teams with a diverse workforce are able to solve problems much more efficiently and faster too. How? More views, background knowledge and varying experiences mean diverse solutions to the target problems. 

4. Boost in Innovation

In this crazily competitive era, the only way for enterprises to sustain their growth is through constant innovation. Whether it be tech, growth strategies, marketing campaigns and even recruitment – innovative measures are the need right now. 

Did you know that diversity in an organization is one of the primary drivers of innovation? As per research by Josh Bersin, inclusive organizations with a diverse workforce are 1.7 times more likely to be the innovation leaders in their industry. It’s vital to understand that with access to more perspectives and viewpoints – teams have a better chance of innovation through collaborative steps.

5. Uplifted Employee Engagement

Employee engagement has a huge impact on your workforce’s productivity and hence business outcomes. Engaging actively also enhances your organization’s work culture as your employees feel closely included in the organization.

Diversity in the workforce promotes inclusion and engagement is the by-product. A survey performed on employees from three different industries suggested that employee engagement is a direct result of diversity and inclusion – another major reason why you need to practice diversity hiring.

6. Effective Decision-Making

An unusually less talked about fact around decision-making is that – better decisions are made when we have more choices. It is important to remember that choices are nothing but different thought processes and approaches. 

Now with a diverse talent pool – come diverse perspectives, backgrounds and experiences, which naturally enable teams to make effective decisions. Catering to the rising competition and multi-dimensional needs of a business is no joke, but optimal and fast decisions work wonders.

7 Ways You can Ensure Diversity Hiring in Your Organization 

Like any other recruitment plan or business goal, diversity hiring needs a strategic approach too. Before you begin on your mission to optimize diversity in your workforce, answer the following questions subjectively:

• What’s the current status of your workforce diversity?
• What are your long-term business goals that will be talent-driven?
• What is your diversity hiring goal?
• How do you approach improving diversity in your organization?
• How do you measure diversity hiring metrics?

Once you answer these questions, it’s time to move on to the execution plan. We have studied numerous recruiting strategies, diversity-building methods, hiring case studies and more resources – to come out with the top 10 ways you can ensure successful diversity hiring for your organization and acquire talent that helps your business grow steadily. Let’s get started!

1. Prioritize Diversity Hiring Mindset

Our mindset drives whatever we do or plan to do in life. So the priority while setting up diversity hiring should be aligning your and the team’s mindset in the right way for diversity hiring. 

The focus of the entire recruitment team should be narrowed down to diversity. That also means they need to avoid convenient hiring and hiring just based on the skills.

You know the importance and positives of diversity hiring, but you need to explain this to your recruitment teams. Additionally, make sure you follow these two practices while prioritizing diversity hiring:

• Resources around diversity hiring are much needed for your recruiters, especially when you're just starting out. Share the relevant guides they would need to recruit diverse candidates.
• Give them enough time as you start diversity hiring because it differs deeply from the traditional methods. You also don’t want them to fall for hiring fast without thinking much. The focus should be on filling the diversity and culture gaps rather than just filling positions. 

2. Revamp Your Job Ads

The primary way of sourcing candidates for most recruiters is job posting platforms – and to begin with the plan, you need to revamp those hiring ads. You might observe one of the two scenarios – either your messaging is targeted to a very broad range of candidates or it’s addressing targeted demographics. Analyze the results of those job ads and take relevant action. If the outcomes weren’t good enough, try pivoting your messaging in a job ad for more specific demographics or for a broader range of candidates.

In every job post, ensure that you’re clearly conveying to your target audience about your ideal candidate persona. 

3. Practice Collaborative Interviews 

The transformation brought by collaborative hiring is no secret. Even the most successful corporations are practising it for their critical hiring processes and observing great results. The strategy can be a fantastic fuel for diversity hiring. As the main idea behind optimizing recruitment for diversity is removing bias, collaborative hiring would definitely add up numerous perspectives and cut down the chances of certain candidates getting an upper hand due to reasons totally unrelated to their abilities. 

An ideal collaborative hiring setup involves recruitment teams made by recruiters, executives and corresponding vertical heads. The final judgement is passed on to the hiring manager by this team and then the decision is taken. 

4. Build Systems to Evaluate Candidates

Having dedicated repeatable systems and structures in place makes recruitment a lot easier. The objective of building systems is to templatize the candidate evaluation to remove any kind of bias involved. This will not only help in boosting diversity hiring but will help organizations and recruiters save a plethora of time and effort. 

Create systems for your entire recruitment process including interview flow and evaluating standards. Every candidate must be assessed on the same parameters in order to serve truly equal opportunities. This will help recruiters get rid of confusion because of long recruitment journeys, and organizations maintain diversity in hiring. 

5. Assess and Optimize Recruitment Team’s Diversity 

Is your internal team that is responsible for conducting recruitment diverse enough? Have you evaluated the interview distribution? Is the same person doing screening every time? 

The core of your diversity hiring begins at the centre - your recruitment crew. Make sure you periodically test out the hiring team’s diversity with respect to their cultural backgrounds, experiences, seniority levels and perspectives. If your recruiting team does not have a diverse set of employees - it’s high time you should add diversity to the hiring team first by acquiring talent.

Working on your recruitment team’s diversity is vital for delivering a candidate experience filled with satisfaction. Additionally, top talent is drawn by diversity in an organization – and recruitment team being at the forefront, it’s always beneficial to optimize the diversity within. 

6. Focus on Retaining Diverse Candidates and Nurture Them

One of the most crucial things you can do to maintain diversity in your organization is to take effective measures to retain candidates. Establish a comfortable and enjoyable environment for them in the organization. Especially for the ones you hired recently as a part of your diversity hiring campaign, keep nurturing and supporting them for all their needs and expectations. Find out if they are settled in their internal communication, bonding well with the team, working closely with their managers and if they’re experiencing inclusion in the workspace. 

For acing your diversity hiring and optimizing the diversity of the workforce in your organizations, continuous nurturing of diverse hires is immensely important. If you want your organization to be known for its diversity, you and the entire recruitment team need to be proactive in establishing diversity seriously and creating a fruitful environment among your workforce.

7. Leverage Technology to Get Desired Diversity Hiring Results

Going back to where we began, recruitment today is too complex. All the strategies and optimal diversity hiring practices need immeasurable efforts. Add to that – the competition for top talent. With so much already on your plate left to figure out, how do you ensure diversity in your hiring? 

From sourcing candidates to engaging, screening, filtering, scheduling, updating the pipeline and the list of tasks for recruiters never ends. We feel you and fret not - let’s discuss how you can delegate all of this and make technology work for you. 

Your hiring process can be comprehensively streamlined by leveraging a recruitment automation tool. An automated solution will help you meet your hiring targets while primarily taking care of diversity and inclusion at the same time. The aim is to get rid of admin tasks and repeated activities which form a majority of recruiting. Further, you would be able to concentrate your efforts on analytical decision-making tasks of the recruitment journey.

How Nurturebox Helps You Optimize Diversity Hiring?

To ace diversity hiring, you want to source diverse candidates, perform consistent outreach, engage with them proactively and manage the recruitment pipeline for your organization. To summarize, it means handling hundreds of recruiting journeys. Although you’re working with a team of recruiters, investing your time in mundane tasks would harm your productivity and act as a barrier to your diversity hiring goals.

Nurturebox streamlines the recruiting challenges for you through end-to-end sourcing automation. What does that mean? Stay organized with your sourcing, invest no time in mundane tasks and generate the best results for your diversity hiring. Here’s how Nurturebox helps recruitment teams:

• Add candidates to campaigns & integrate with ATS: Source candidates like a pro, use professional platforms like LinkedIn to find candidates’ contact details and add them to your sourcing campaigns. Integrate Nurturebox with your existing ATS or opt for Recruitee plugin to automate your candidate pipeline management.

• Outreach and engagement on Auto-pilot: It is as exciting as it sounds. Nurturebox enables your multi-channel outreach and engagement with candidates through LinkedIn, WhatsApp and emails. And you do not miss out on personalization too – engage with diverse candidates like never before to ensure you never miss out on your hiring goals.

• Track and analyze your progress: The most successful recruiters have achieved success because they are data-driven. With Nurturebox, you know what works and can pivot if required at the right time. Track your sourcing and engagement campaign analytics to double down on what’s working optimally. 

Diversity hiring is not a challenge too complex – it just needs enough awareness and the strategies to execute successfully. The recruitment space is now more demanding than ever and automation is the key to fulfilling modern organizations’ never-ending needs. Nurturebox’s Chrome extension allows you to simplify talent sourcing, engagement and management to its core. It’s vital to shift your focus from management tasks to the analysis of candidates to ace your diversity hiring.

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