Tips for Recruiting and Retaining a Diverse and Inclusive Workforce

Diversity in recruitment and employment is important in an organization because it encourages creative and innovative thinking within the workplace. Recruiting professionals from diverse backgrounds at all seniority levels enables a business to gain access to varied perspectives and viewpoints. Organizations with a diverse workforce from different backgrounds have been found to perform better than firms with a less diverse staff. 

Advantages and benefits of diversity

The advantages of having a diverse staff are increasingly being recognized; however, developing and implementing strategies and policies to build a diverse workforce remains a challenge for business executives. Studies have indicated that having a diverse staff can help a firm to improve the bottom line, drive innovation, and increase productivity among employees. To realize the benefits of a diverse staff, employers must actively seek to engage candidates regardless of their ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or social background.

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Five Top Tips to Improve Diversity in Your Organization

1. Modernize Corporate Policies

Modernize your company policies to suit the needs of a diverse workforce. This will enable you to tap into a diverse talent pool and strengthen your employer brand. Have a religious and cultural observance policy. These allow employees to take time off based on their religious or cultural situation. Implement policies for disabled workers, workers with mental healthissues, women, parents or caretakers, for example.

2. Keep Diversity in your Job Descriptions

Think carefully about the skills you are looking for and articulate them appropriately. Be careful not to use language that will immediately alienate a group of people. For example, using excessive business jargon puts off young people from underprivileged backgrounds. Use software programs that highlight stereotypically gendered words and alternate between ‘he’ and ‘she’ in your job descriptions to strike the right balance.

3. Automate the Recruitment Process

Use software to remove identifying information from CVs, such as age, race, gender, religion, or address. Algorithms can help select candidates with the right skills and attributes for the job regardless of their background, ethnicity, social mobility or gender.

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4. Standardize Job Interviews

Adopt a structured, rigorous, and scientific recruitment process using psychometric testing. Ask all candidates the same questions and use a scorecard system to rank their skills, experience and attributes against the position’s requirements. You can include likeability, but the score system should apply to this too. By treating each candidate equally, you mitigate the risk of unconscious bias impacting your hiring process. 

5. Offer New Ways of Working

Having a flexible working policy will attract workers who find it difficult to commit to a nine to five job such as parents, those with disabilities and mental health issues, and millennials who are looking for a better work-life balance.

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Recruitment requires a strategic approach to make sure businesses and teams are selecting the right employees who can support them in building a stronger company. A great way of doing this is to ensure the talent pool is diverse in culture, skill sets, abilities and experiences–by applying these five tips you will be able to do just that!