Written by Elle Lambropoulos
OVERVIEW
Building a diverse team begins with an inclusive recruitment process. Recommended practices limit implicit biases and remove barriers to entry throughout the application, interview, and decision-making stages. Early team diversity is integral for culture formation, the network to scale a diverse workforce, and opportunity for underrepresented communities to build wealth.
BUSINESS CASE
An inclusive recruitment process sources the best talent for the job and creates a dynamic workforce. According to McKinsey research, companies in the top quartile for diversity are more likely to have above-average profitability. The top quartiles for gender and ethnic diversity are 25% and 36% more likely to outperform, respectively.[1]
RECOMMENDATIONS
Your team doesn’t have to create a new recruitment process to hire a diverse team. Existing practices can be upgraded for inclusion.
📝 Create an unbiased job description.
The language used in job descriptions affects who applies for the role. Descriptors or requirements that may seem standard can marginalize a segment of your talent pool. Use gender-neutral language, avoiding traditional masculine or feminine descriptors like ‘aggressive.’ Limit the required skills to only what is necessary - women are less likely to apply unless they meet 100% of requirements.[2] Eliminating bias in job postings increases the number of qualified applicants.
Datapeople helps you write clear, inclusive job posts that attract more diverse, qualified candidate pools. Datapeople combines everything you need to know about job content into a single predictive performance score that helps you avoid small mistakes and make targeted improvements.
Textio's augmented writing platform guides recruiting teams to quickly optimize job posts and candidate outreach with inclusive, on-brand language.
💼 Diversify candidate pipelines.
Diverse candidates need to see the job posting in order to apply, and they may be looking for roles outside of your typical recruitment channels. Even modest improvements to candidate pool diversity can yield significantly more diverse hires.[3] Augment your talent pipelines with tools sourcing talent from diverse backgrounds to increase the representation of your candidate pool.
Jopwell is a career advancement platform helping employers increase Black, Latinx, and Native American representation. Jopwell empowers its community to learn, connect, and apply for professional opportunities while enabling companies to recruit top talent from the most historically underrepresented ethnic minority groups.
Yello's software helps employers manage their recruitment process to source and engage qualified and diverse early-career candidates. Yello provides resources to connect with leading talent, meet DEI goals, and reinforce a strong brand, all while maximizing ROI.
Entelo provides source-to-hire automation technology alongside managed services for a platform that focuses on results. Their technology eliminates hiring fire drills by helping companies proactively find, connect with, and hire skilled, underrepresented talent.
Joonko enables talent acquisition managers to enrich the top of their talent pipeline with pre-qualified diverse talent and exchange silver medalist candidates.
🏆 Minimize bias during the interview and selection process.
Unconscious biases create pattern recognition or mental shortcuts that undercut some candidates and create a less diverse workforce. Blind recruitment removes identifiers (e.g., age, gender) to focus attention on applicant qualifications rather than background. Creating a standard interview rubric, providing numerical scores rather than qualitative feedback, and including diverse interviewers also reduce bias. Review recruitment data at each stage of the funnel to determine where diversity narrows.
MeVitae seamlessly integrates into Application Tracking Systems to de-bias hiring processes. Their blind recruiting tool can remove over 20 different parameters, including name and gender, from 600 CVs/cover letters in just 6 seconds.
Career.Place is a talent evaluation solution that allows employers to bypass resumes until after they’ve honed in on the candidates with the traits and capabilities they need most. The solution safeguards against costly hiring mistakes by focusing on what really matters—while enabling the avoidance of unintentional bias.
iCIMS is a diversity recruiting tool that pushes qualifications and skills to the forefront of recruitment to mitigate unconscious bias. Their technology removes personal identifiers in applications and uses AI to pre-screen candidates with a merit-based approach.
[2] https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless-theyre-100-qualified