How to Hire a Diverse Team
There are many reasons why having a diverse team is extremely beneficial to organizations. Companies that have a culture that includes strong diversity, equity and inclusion measures outperform competitors and achieve greater profits. They see reduced employee turnover, better employee engagement and company reputation, faster problem solving, higher innovation, and better decision making.
When looking to diversify your team it is important to use a holistic approach that includes diversity, inclusion and equity strategies to ensure that you are able to retain you team. Without inclusion and equity efforts your team will not feel valued and appreciated which will result in high employee turnover and unhappy employees.
The first step in hiring diverse candidates is finding them. In order to find the right candidates you need to have a solid sourcing strategy in place as well as a strong employer brand to attract them. Below are some tips to help you find diverse candidates.
Have a good sourcing strategy. A strong diversity sourcing strategy includes searching for candidates using specific keywords and phrases. For example, you could search for historically Black colleges or look for members of specific organizations.
Create a strong brand. Develop a careers page on your website with information about your company, making it clear that you value diversity and encourage people from underrepresented groups to apply. Create social media and marketing campaigns that say the same thing.
Utilize diversity-focused job boards. There are many diversity-focused job boards out there where you can advertise your job postings. You can even hold diversity job fairs and advertise for them on these boards.
Build relationships with colleges. Contacting colleges and trade schools is a great way to diversify your pipeline. It’s even better to target historically diverse schools and to contact associations within the schools that focus on your diversity goals. Building strong relationships with the schools and associations should keep a great stream of diverse candidates coming your way.
Ask for employee referrals but be careful with them. Employee referrals can be some of your best hires but you need to be vigilant with them if you are trying to create a more diverse team. While they are also a huge part of your diversity hiring initiatives, employee referrals can also do the opposite as people may refer friends or colleagues who look like and share similar beliefs to themselves which can end up doing the opposite of what you’re trying to accomplish. If you implement an employee referral program just make sure that you highlight that you are looking to create a more diverse team.
Finding the right candidates is just the first step in the process. Once you have a great pipeline of diverse candidates, how do you make sure that your interviewing process is fair and equitable?
Diversify your interview panel. While it may be difficult in the beginning if your team has been historically similar to one another, it is important to ensure that the interview panel is diverse. You should include people with different backgrounds, groups, and beliefs. The more diverse your interview teams are the less discrimination there will likely be.
Use blind hiring practices. Blind hiring is a practice where the candidate’s information is hidden during the initial hiring stages to eliminate biases based on names, ages, genders, race and ethnicity. This practice can also improve equity initiatives by looking at skills rather than where someone attended school or previous employers.
Train your recruiters, hiring managers and all interviewers. You want to ensure that your recruiters, hiring managers and interviewers have been trained on diversity hiring including unconscious bias training and understanding the depths of the issues surrounding racism and discrimination. These trainings need to be consistently reinforced to make sure that they are followed through.
Organizations are starting to realize the benefits of having a diverse team which is why it is imperative to have strong diversity, equity and inclusion strategies in place. Companies are actively trying to recruit diverse talent so if you do not have inclusion and equity processes in place to let your employees know that they are valued and appreciated then your diversity recruitment efforts could be wasted.
Having a strong diversity recruitment and sourcing strategy along with a strong employer brand and following fair and consistent diversity, equity and inclusion processes will help you have a happy, successful, diverse team.
What are some other tips and tricks that have worked for you when building out your diverse team?
If you are struggling with finding diverse talent my company VSourced offers talent sourcing services where we specialize in diversity sourcing. I also offer DEI consulting services if you need help with your diversity, equity and inclusion strategies.
