Creating recruitment, candidate evaluation, and hiring practices that attract a diverse set of high-quality candidates are all concepts of diversity hiring. It’s not just about casting a wide net or hiring from underrepresented demographics, but also about removing biases from your processes and ultimately finding the best candidates that infuse your workplace with energy and ideas. The end goal, after all, is to have the best employee base to grow your business.
Implementing a Diverse Hiring Process
Diversity hiring requires a thorough understanding of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). With that understanding, you can start implementing changes within your company to factor these in at each step—then ensure that this culture continues on even past the hiring stage. Below are some steps to fully understand how to implement a diverse hiring process.
Understand the Types of Diversity
Although historically, making a diversity hire has been focused on hiring racial minorities and women (bolstered by federal requirements), it has grown beyond racial and gender lines. There are three kinds of diversity:
- Internal: This is the kind one is born with, including demographics like race, ethnicity, and age. Gender identity and physical capability are also included here.
- External: This refers to characteristics that influence a person’s development, such as education, religion, citizenship, geographic location, socioeconomic status, family status, and even personal experiences.
- Worldview: This includes political and cultural beliefs and even attitudes toward life.
True diversity hiring, therefore, recognizes these levels of diversity and weeds out hiring biases where they do not apply. People from different backgrounds bring different perspectives and ideas, leading to new innovations. In the sales and service industries, for instance, it means you have employees who can identify with customer needs.
Establish Yourself as a Diverse Company
Make sure your website reflects the diversity of your workforce—blog about it or create a recruiting video dedicated to workplace diversity. However, promoting yourself as a diversity-friendly workforce won’t mean much if you don’t also practice it daily. Build a company culture based on respect for different people, the free sharing of ideas, and the promotion of people based on merit.
Employ Diverse Recruitment Practices
- Create Job Descriptions That Promote Diversity
A diverse job description goes beyond gender-neutral language, as revealed by a recent study conducted by MIT Sloan. While nice-to-haves, for example, could decrease the opportunity for diversity, posting an ambiguous job description could attract the wrong candidates. According to Indeed, 42% of employers had to revise a job description after posting it because they were attracting unqualified candidates.
LinkedIn provides examples of how to write job descriptions that attract the right people.
- Post to Diverse Job Boards
Posting to job boards that promote diversity, including career-specific boards, is a smart step for finding and hiring a diverse team. These job boards cater directly to specific diverse backgrounds and will allow your open positions to get in front of multiple job seekers. - Have a Blind Hiring Process
A blind hiring process means hiring for talent and qualifications instead of singling out someone for demographics, even if you do so with the best intentions. You can do this by blocking out information that signals age, ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic status (among other factors) when evaluating resumes.
But this process applies to more than just the resume—it means using tools like pre-skills assessments and adopting bias-free interviewing practices. It also helps to have a heterogeneous team interviewing candidates, so aim for a mix of ages, genders, and ethnicities.
Measuring Your Diversity Hiring Goals
Creating a diversity hiring initiative and putting it on paper looks good. However, it does not mean anything unless you can measure it. Here are some factors to check whether the initiative is working or not:
Workforce demographics are a crucial component of measuring diversity within an organization. This metric involves tracking the overall composition of your workforce across various dimensions of diversity, providing a comprehensive snapshot of representation within your company.
The primary aspects typically measured include gender ratio, which looks at the proportion of men, women, and nonbinary employees across different levels of the organization. Another key factor is racial and ethnic composition, which takes the percentages of racial and ethnic groups represented in your workforce. Age distribution is also important as it helps ensure a balance of generations and experiences within the company.
Other demographics include LGBTQ+ representation, employees with disabilities, and veteran status. These metrics, when analyzed together and over time, can reveal patterns in hiring, retention, and promotion practices, helping organizations identify areas where they need to focus their diversity and inclusion efforts.
Tracking and measuring recruitment metrics can provide insights into potential biases in your recruitment funnel and help you identify areas for improvement. This includes looking into the diversity of your applicant pool and analyzing the demographic breakdown of all applicants for open positions. This data can reveal whether your job postings and employer brand are appealing to a diverse range of candidates. Similarly, measuring the diversity of candidates interviewed shows how well diverse applicants are progressing through the initial screening stages. Looking at the diversity of new hires as well will show you the ultimate outcome of your recruitment efforts in terms of bringing diverse talent into the organization.
To gain a more comprehensive understanding of your recruitment process, it’s also valuable to track the source of hire. This information can help you identify which recruitment channels are most effective in reaching diverse talent pools.
Retention rates go beyond simply tracking who stays with the company. It also involves checking the overall turnover rate by group to identify whether certain groups are leaving the organization at higher rates than others. You can further break it down into voluntary and involuntary turnover rates, which can reveal different types of challenges. For instance, high voluntary turnover among specific groups might indicate issues with inclusion or career development opportunities, while high involuntary turnover could suggest potential biases in performance evaluation or management practices.
Another crucial retention metric is the average tenure by demographic group. This can highlight disparities in long-term engagement and satisfaction among different employee populations. Conducting thoughtful exit interviews plays a vital role in understanding the reasons for leaving. It can uncover specific issues that may be driving diverse talent away from the organization. Additionally, tracking retention rates of high performers across different demographics can tell you how well your organization is nurturing and retaining its top talents.
This metric analyzes salary disparity by gender, race, and other relevant factors. It examines base salaries, bonuses, and other forms of compensation to get a comprehensive view of pay practices. This analysis should not just focus on the raw numbers, but also take into account other factors, such as job level, experience, and performance, to ensure comparisons are meaningful. Starting salary comparisons for new hires are particularly revealing, as they can uncover potential biases in initial negotiations or decision-making processes that could lead to long-term pay inequities.
Beyond basic salary analysis, you should also look at the distribution of bonuses and equity across different demographic groups. This is crucial if you belong in an industry where a significant portion of compensation comes from performance bonuses or stock options. Also, examine pay band distribution to identify whether certain groups are unreasonably clustered at the lower end of pay ranges for their positions. Additionally, consider providing transparency in pay practices, as it helps in building trust and ensures employees that they are being compensated fairly regardless of their demographic background.
The inclusion index looks at the overall inclusivity of your organization’s culture and practices. Unlike the other metrics on this list that focus on specific aspects of representations, this metric provides a holistic view of how well the company fosters an environment where all employees are valued, respected, and empowered to contribute fully. This composite score typically incorporates various factors that contribute to an inclusive workplace. Key components often include measures of psychological safety, which assess whether employees feel comfortable expressing their opinions, taking risks, and being their authentic selves at work.
Inclusion also encompasses metrics related to equitable decision-making processes, examining whether important decisions about assignments, promotions, and resource allocation are made fairly and transparently. The collaborative nature of the work environment is another important aspect, measuring how well diverse teams work together and leverage their differences for better outcomes.
Why Diversity Is Important in Hiring
Diversity in hiring is crucial, as it brings together a wide range of perspectives, experiences, and skills, fostering innovation and better problem-solving within the organization. Companies that embrace diversity are better equipped to understand and serve different markets, leading to improved customer satisfaction and business growth.
Research supports the tangible benefits of diversity, with diverse companies earning 2.5 times higher cash flow per employee. Additionally, companies with greater gender representation are 27% more likely to financially outperform their less diverse counterparts. These statistics highlight how diversity not only promotes a more inclusive work environment but also directly contributes to a company’s financial success and competitive advantage in the marketplace.
What Laws Govern Diversity Hiring?
There are federal and state laws concerning finding diverse employees, mainly in terms of antidiscrimination. It’s best to approach increasing the diversity in your workplace as organically as possible—avoid setting processes that largely favor certain groups who are disadvantaged over others, i.e., transgender candidates vs those with a disability or of an ethnic minority.
Click the tabs below to learn more about specific laws governing diversity in the workplace.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
In the hiring process, diversity refers to the differences among candidates, such as age, gender, race, and other characteristics. The presence of these differences ensures a wide range of perspectives. Inclusion, on the other hand, focuses on creating a supportive and equitable environment where individuals are valued, promoting their full participation within the organization.
Effective strategies for sourcing diverse candidates include partnering with organizations that focus on underrepresented groups, attending diversity fairs, and utilizing job boards that cater to specific demographics. Additionally, expanding outreach to diverse professional networks, encouraging employee referrals from diverse backgrounds, and creating inclusive job descriptions that appeal to a broader audience can help attract a more varied candidate pool.
Bottom Line
Diversity hiring is good for businesses—and for society in general—as it creates new opportunities for those in protected classes. The best way to make diversity hires for your business is to make it an ongoing part of your company culture by incorporating it into your job descriptions, postings, and hiring process.
