This year has seemingly unhinged chaos and impacted peoples’ lives in various ways; ultimately carrying over into their work life and workplace! 2020 has brought diversity, equality, and inclusion to the surface-level which is something that has been talked about in the talent acquisition industry for many years previous. We should be moving towards inclusivity when it comes to culture,equity, and diversity.
Consider:
What does your hiring pipeline look like? Is it diverse enough?
Is it hard for you to hire people from underrepresented groups?
It is definitely time to change that mentality and incorporate an innovative way to expand your pipeline while diversifying your candidate pools.
4 Steps to Inclusivity:
1. People:
When reviewing your hiring process, are you providing inclusive job descriptions by using proper terminology? Are you engaging a wide variety of applicants? Do you rely heavily on referrals? Relying on referrals is often seen as a pitfall when it comes to diversifying your candidate pool. However, sometimes, referrals can actually help put an intentional emphasis on diversifying your pool. How do you change your referral tactics? When looking for referrals, you can specify your talent referral requests (for women and candidates from underrepresented groups) or incentivize referrals with a bonus; meaning if you refer a candidate from an underrepresented group, you could receive a bonus! By motivating employees to help increase diversity, it increases awareness of the importance behind it while inspiring inclusivity efforts.
2. Leadership:
How are these efforts to be sustained? Is it time to delegate an employee to be a leader that tracks efforts and reports updates to the company in any concerns of diversity? Being the recruiters we are, it is our responsibility to make change and reshape workplaces to become more inclusive to underrepresented groups; changing not only workplaces, but ultimately the world.
3. Culture
Whenit comes to workplace culture, it is important to address any issues at the stake rather than covering it up; in a sense ‘diversity washing’ it. Source the origin of your diversity problem, tackle it, and avoid creating a toxic work culture. Whether it is in-person or online, support one another and raise issues that are of concern!
4. Services
Are you creating an inclusive environment both internally and externally? Is the content you are posting of high-quality and culturally relevant? Incorporating diversity efforts into your company can be done by auditing job boards, targeting diverse candidates, offering internships, showcasing diversity efforts, creating inclusive company policies, using blind resumes and interviews, and re-evaluating how you screen. All of these efforts showcase your services in a new light.
Takeaways:
It is our job to make inclusivity an integral part of the hiring process. Our work has lasting impacts so let us challenge the odds of diversity and make change! Start taking steps in the right direction individually, with your team, and overall, with your company. Change is a process and does indeed take time, so start now.
