7 Steps To Hire Diversity of Candidates

Introduction

A great business transformation and organizational shift is happening, as the Future of Work is being reimagined, creating a growing skills gap. 

72% leaders are concerned about the skills gap – the highest level since 2019 – 56% feel they’re not keeping up with the rapid speed of digital transformation, and 80% are on their journeys to becoming skills-based organizations 

Organizations must tap into a wider and more diverse and global talent pool to achieve the skills-role match. 

What diversity means in the current world context and why diversity and Equity are inseparable / DEI in the modern-day world

Today, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) goes beyond mere issues of race and gender, to a more holistic view. Diversity is fundamentally all the ways that people are unique – being differently abled, having different backgrounds, sexual orientations, cultures, age, thinking styles, marital status, parental status, experiences, and much more. It is now closely linked with the entire employee experience. Inclusion is creating an environment where each individual can be their authentic self and bring their best work and ideas to the table. Equity involves a fine balance between treating everyone equally, versus acknowledging and accepting individual differences, so that everyone can do their very best work. 

DEI has become an intrinsic part of the Employee Value Proposition (EVP), making employees feel seen, heard, and valued without needing to change who they are. AI and tech are driving productivity and possibilities, yet, they have the potential to create greater inequities and impersonalization. 

Employees who feel comfortable bringing their authentic self to work are two times more likely to trust their organization and over five times more likely to be satisfied with no intent to leave. 

Hence the need for a more DEI-centric workforce strategy .

Why Diversity Hires Matter?

Today’s workforce strives for greater meaning and purpose from work life, seeking new perspectives and creating larger impact. DEI is now looked upon as a powerful tool to create a sense of trust and belonging between employer-employee. DEI is now looked at as a means to achieve skills-based hiring, and therein, access a wider talent pool. 

Focusing on skills can increase talent pools by 10x

80% of surveyed recruiting pros saying their organizations are committed to creating a more diverse workforce, skills-based hiring is set to gain traction in the years ahead .

Much of today’s EVP comes from DEI; in fact, DEI now shapes the entire workforce agenda.  Not just the workforce agenda, but the business agenda at large. DEI is linked with better financial performance, by improving innovation, performance, and the workplace experience across the board. 

Companies with above-average diversity on their management teams also report innovation revenue 19 percentage points higher than companies with below-average leadership diversity.

7 Ways To Promote Diversity Hires

Despite this business-forward DEI view, there exists a gap in the DEI outcomes. 

68% of Gen Z workers are not satisfied with their organization’s progress in creating a diverse and inclusive work environment.

This calls for a strategic DEI approach and particularly a diversity recruitment strategy that aligns with the overall business strategy. Here is how: 

• Define Diversity Goals and Objectives: It is critical to define the DEI strategy in line with the business goals. The workforce planning exercise must proactively identify and tag roles across functions, which will benefit from diversity candidates and diverse perspectives. For example, product design in a women-focused brand can include more women employees to help gain the ‘female perspective’.

• Build DEI skills internally: Organizations must first orient internal employees and managers towards DEI, through trainings on gender sensitivity, cross-cultural awareness,  open mindedness and avoiding unconscious bias, etc. DEI begins from within, and creating DEI-friendly thinking is a first step to real change.

• Make recruitment processes skills-centric: Adopting a skills-first hiring approach helps focus exclusively on skills and capability required for the role. This may mean giving less importance to degrees, and more to real-life skills and diverse experiences. This “skills mindset” must be embedded into every step of the recruitment pipeline, from Sourcing-Screening-Selection. Recruiters must pay attention to the small details through empathy-led questions. “Is our career portal easy to access for visually impaired?”, “Are our Job Descriptions inclusively worded?”, and so on. Another approach is on demand recruiting to meet the skill needs in an agile manner.

• Tap into a larger Talent Pool: To reach diverse candidates, recruiters must widen their talent pool . Some examples are women and returning mothers, LGBTQ, minority ethnicities and races, global talent with and cross-cultural perspectives, diverse age groups, etc. A unique pool is people with different experience-types, such as gig workers, freelancers, interim talent, consultants, and such on demand workforce.

• Embed DEI into the EVP: To reach a diverse workforce, DEI must be embedded into the EVP – the Employer Branding messaging. Research shows that 56% of Gen Z workers would not accept a role without diverse leadership. Hence, proactively communicating the DEI-focus to the outside world is a must to attract and engage diverse talent.

• Leverage technology: Use technology to reduce human biases in diversity hiring. AI in HR can help by enabling skills-role match effectively and efficiently, while removing the “human judgement” factor. Investing in an integrated talent platform with access to diverse talent pools and tools to assess diverse talent (such as SolveCube), is a good starting point.

• Monitor and Measure DEI outcomes: Define the right recruitment KPIs and KRAs which help track DEI outcomes. For example, to understand recruiter biases that hamper diversity, carry out analytics to understand what kind of employee groups are applying,  being hired, promoted, retained, given pay increments, etc. To assess any biases, measure hires across each recruitment stage, and also retentions across employee groups. Diversity in leadership is a critical DEI metric. For some businesses it may also make sense to measure DEI outcomes amongst customers, suppliers, vendors etc.

• Foster an inclusive workplace: For any DEI effort to sustain, demands a supportive environment. Start with putting in place basic hygiene-factors of DEI-friendly infrastructure, operations and policy. For example, to tap into the pool of returning mothers, one may want to introduce a policy around flexible working or remote working. For diverse people groups to come together and give their best selves, an environment of trust, respect, psychological safety, belonging, fairness, transparency and honesty is a must. A culture of “celebrating and harnessing differences” in the ways of working, is essential to DEI success. 

Upholding DEI in the Talent Acquisition function is not just a process change, it is a mindset shift. Recruiters, hiring managers, employees, and top leaders must embrace this shift towards skills-based hiring and DEI-focus. Cultivating a DEI-oriented company culture boils down to embracing the values of acceptance-acknowledgement-appreciation of differences. This should be done not merely from a narrow employee-lens, but from a bare basic human-lens for sustained DEI benefits to be realized.