How to Measure Diversity in Your Recruiting Efforts?

Numerous businesses aim to improve diversity and inclusion in their workforce. At the beginning of 2022, over 35% of HR leaders said diversity is one of their top five priorities for the year. And there’s no reason it shouldn’t be – diversity and inclusion in the workforce help organizations grow in a number of ways. 

From boosting your organization’s productivity to ensuring continuous innovation and attracting quality applications when you’re sourcing talent – a healthy diversity pushes 

However, when it comes to diversity recruiting, a majority of recruiters are either not prepared for achieving such goals or lack the necessary guidance to hire and retain diverse talent effectively.  

The first step towards building a diverse workforce is using the right diversity recruiting metrics to accurately measure the results and analyze the existing gaps. The biggest reason of having multiple diversity metrics is to cater to the unique requirements of each organization. 

Recruitment in modern times is heavily inclined toward chasing top-quality talent regardless of gender, ethnicity, background, and culture. With goals like rapid staffing and multifold growth, it’s becoming even more tricky to execute and evaluate diversity recruitment at an organizational level. 

But you don’t need to worry as you’re already here. We will break down diversity recruitment, it’s importance, and the top X diversity recruiting metrics you need to keep in mind. As a recruiter, this discussion will not only give you insights to improve your recruitment but also ensure your organization’s long-term growth.

Diversity Hiring in the Present Age: How Does it Look Like?

Diversity hiring refers to practicing recruitment and hiring in a way that is unaffected by biases related to a candidate’s gender, race, age, religion, ethnicity, cultural background, and any characteristics that are irrelevant to their talent or job performance. 

Recruiters often struggle in removing these biases thoroughly as unconscious and learned stereotypes are often deeply rooted in human behavior. The goal of incorporating diversity hiring practices and then measuring them using relevant metrics is to ensure a fair and equal recruiting process is followed for all candidates.

Gone are the days when diversity in the workforce was just seen as an aesthetic factor that was ‘nice to have’ for organizations. As continuous improvement and innovation happen with the viewpoints of many, it’s now a necessity for driving growth attracting better candidates, and retaining top talent.  

As a recruiter, you need to ensure that your diversity-led recruitment strategy feels welcoming for all candidates belonging to numerous backgrounds. Hence, you can build a diverse workforce that helps your organization with assured innovation and profitable growth.

And all of these are not mere claims or expert opinions, statistics tell a similar story. Take a look:

• 67% of job seekers consider workplace diversity an important factor when considering employment opportunities
• 43% of companies with diverse management showed higher profits
• Diverse teams are 87% better decision-makers than individuals
• Companies employing an equal number of men and women manage to produce up to 41% higher revenue.

Let’s now move forward to the top tips of diversity recruitment for producing optimal recruitment outcomes in your organization.

What Does Diversity Hiring Represent and What It Does Not Mean?

The idea behind diversity hiring is pretty straightforward: to hire candidates only on the basis of their job performance capabilities while mitigating any kind of bias. But unlike other hiring goals, assuring healthy diversity in recruiting is not an easy task. 

Even after setting up diversity recruiting goals, organizations need help in delivering them. Regardless of the scale of a business or team size, every organization must follow these do’s and dont’s while practicing and measuring diversity recruiting:

1. DO set up realistic recruitment goals as per the current diversity status   

It’s essential to measure your current team’s diversity before hopping on to fresh diversity recruitment goals. Recruiter capacity planning and numerous other factors come into the picture at this stage of recruiting.

To measure your current diversity, you can either analyze the stored data or ask your employees to fill up anonymous survey forms. Make sure you convey the goals of improving the diversity at your organization clearly. This will help you boost the response rate and more importantly – people will be more than willing to refer relevant candidates.   

2. DON’T just zero in on gender and race for diversity hiring

Contrary to popular opinion, numerous factors apart from a candidate’s gender and race are taken into account while following diversity hiring plans. While multiple characteristics do make your job a tad bit more tricky, they play a significant role in skyrocketing an organization’s profitability and growth. 

Here are the top variables contributing to the diversity of a workforce:

• Age
• Gender
• Race
• Ethnicity
• Religion
• Educational background
• Sexual orientation

3. DO share your diversity policies with candidates transparently

Attracting quality candidates isn’t easy today. It’s vital for recruiters to openly share their diversity recruitment practices and policies that go behind the scenes. Some of the policies that immensely help in talent attraction and retention are:

• Recruitment and Selection policy: A detailed description of the steps taken to ensure unbiased recruitment and selection process. Ideally, this policy highlights the transparency and consistency of efforts put in to build a diverse workforce along with the proactive support being available to candidates.

• Work-Life policy: It covers parental, adoption, family-friendly leaves, and support for employees who are transitioning. 

• Dignity at Work policy: It defines the organization’s commitment to ensuring no unwanted behavior. This policy should clearly lay down the formal procedure in case of any misconduct or complaints.

4. DON’T skip diversity recruitment plans in your employer branding strategy

A major chunk of the workforce considers diversity and inclusion as the primary requirements when choosing the employer to work with. However, claiming that you value diversity and present equal rights to everyone – doesn’t work.  

Your commitment and efforts towards diversity hiring and inclusion should be clearly visible to the world, and especially to your audience as an employer. When you actively promote your diversity and inclusion goals, the chance of receiving applications from top talent significantly increases.

Here are some of the activities you can consistently do for the same objective:

• Share testimonials from employees representing diverse backgrounds
• Ask your team members to post about this on their LinkedIn account
• Post thought leadership content around the need for diversity hiring and the challenges surrounding it

5. DO screen your recruiters to remove unconscious bias internally

This is one of the most under-utilized tips for removing the unconscious bias present in almost everyone. Screening tests help you as a recruiter to divert your focus on the aspects that matter – including the skills, experience, and knowledge of the candidate. 

To evaluate your candidates’ skills based on the tasks they will be performing in the job, you need to remove the following biases which are usually noticed in recruitment processes:

• Gender bias
• Affinity bias
• Location-based bias
• Educational background bias
• Linguistic bias

To prevent your diversity hiring plans from being affected by these unconscious biases, you can add an objective screening test for the entire recruiting team.

6. DON’T ignore diversity training for your recruiting team

In order to accomplish your diversity recruitment objectives, your complete recruitment team needs to be on the same grounds as you. While screening tests help you assess their current unconscious biases, you now need to guide your team members about diversity recruitment.

Diving a bit deeper, the core aim is to educate them about the different parameters that contribute to the efficiency of diversity hiring. From unconscious biases to diversity policies, results of misconduct, and more – diversity training for your recruiting team should cover it all. 

Top 7 Diversity Recruiting Metrics to Measure

If you have been in the talent acquisition space for quite some time now, you would probably know how important it is to measure the right recruitment metrics. If you don’t measure, there’s no scope for improvement. Similarly, for your diversity recruiting initiatives, you need to take care of specific metrics. Here are the top 7 most commonly used and meaningful diversity recruiting metrics:

1. Diversity-Focused Outreach Activity  

First things first, you need to assess how many target candidates is your team reaching out to for each of the open roles. How many underrepresented candidates are responding to the outreach? How many of those are you screening with a phone round?

This metric primarily tells you if your outreach is targeting the right talent, if your message is right, and if you can know in case the process needs to be reworked. Ensure you record the data consistently and analyze it at least once every month to know if your team is reaching out to a diverse talent pool.  

2. Diversity of Hiring Panel

The diversity of your recruitment team – from sourcing experts to interviewers, significantly matters when it comes to effectively hiring diverse talent. The team and especially the interviewing panel should have people of different demographics like age, gender, race, educational background, and skills and experience.

The higher the diversity in your recruitment team, the more effectively you will be able to remove unconscious bias. Additionally, it makes the candidates feel more involved, relatable, and convenient in the interviews.  

3. Diversity of Employees vs Your Talent Pool 

To check if you’re hiring enough diverse talent, you need to compare the diversity of applicants to the overall diversity of people you are hiring. If the figures around target demographics vary significantly, it’s a clear indication your recruitment process is biased and needs to be rectified.

As you try to improve this metric and bring both the figures close, keep track of this ratio while  continuously hiring candidates. Remember - the core aim is to remove bias and look for ways to do the same for optimizing the diversity of your talent pool.

4. Recruitment Funnel Conversions

^Conversion rates at each stage of the recruitment funnel tell you the efficiency of your diversity recruitment efforts. To find out if underrepresented candidates are being successfully recruited, conversion rates at various stages are always vital. Here are the metrics that come under this umbrella:

• Percentage of unrepresented candidates making it to the phone screen round
• Percentage of unrepresented screened candidates successfully reaching the interview rounds
• Percentage of unrepresented interviewed candidates qualifying all the stages and getting the offer letter
• Finally, the percentage of offered candidates ultimately joining the o 

Conversion rates directly tell you if the recruitment funnel is reflecting biases.  

5. Diversity Across All Organizational Levels

From leadership positions to entry-level roles, organizations need to have talent coming from diverse backgrounds at all levels. This is a critical metric to be considered for organizations as it conveys that everyone can learn from people who are underrepresented.

A study by McKinsey showed women of color accounted for only 4% of C-suite executives. To start off with, you have to measure the percentage of employees with different demographics working at various levels and departments of the organization.

DEI employee surveys (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) can help you boost your diversity across various departments and levels.    

6. Source of Hire

Measuring the efficiency of each channel while sourcing and recruiting diverse candidates is another essential step for analyzing and improving diversity recruitment. Choose the top talent sourcing channels like social media, job boards, events, and referrals – and consistently measure the effectiveness of each of them.

The idea is to take data-backed decisions and double down on the channels that work the best for your talent acquisition.

7. Candidate Experience

In order to truly understand the effectiveness of a recruitment practice or initiative, we should priorly analyze how the candidates are feeling about it. In the case of diversity hiring, candidate experience (CX) is even more vital as we are aiming to serve better, fair, and equal opportunities for all. 

Conduct a survey among your candidates asking them both qualitative and quantitative questions. Some examples of the questions you can include in it are:

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• On a scale of 1-10, what’s their satisfaction score with the diversity recruitment efforts?
• How likely are they to recommend or refer someone to get hired by the organization?
• What was the most delightful part of their recruitment journey?
• What according to them can be improved in order to hire better and more diverse talent?