What Does It Mean to “Hire for Diversity”? 5 Actionable Strategies to Increase Diversity at your Org

What does it mean to hire for diversity?

To hire diversely is to hire qualified candidates who bring a diversity of experience, background, ability, and perspectives. With all other qualifications being equal, this includes considering a person’s gender identification, ethnic and cultural background, self-identification, and other aspects as part of that prospective employee’s unique viewpoint and what they could potentially bring to the table.

Hiring for diversity also means that employers need to recognize that unconscious biases exist, and they need to work towards addressing those biases. Everyone holds unconscious biases whether we realize it or not, and the first step is to recognize that it does impact our hiring decisions. From there, employers can create systematic processes that will prevent unconscious bias from excluding diverse qualified candidates.

How can you hire more diversely?

1. Identify the Problem: Utilizing Data and Targets for Diversity

The first step is to measure and assess where your company currently stands in terms of its employee population. Gathering and analyzing your current stats, such as basic self-reported demographics and pay equity data, will help establish a baseline to then make moves towards improvement.

Once you’ve identified your data gaps and key data points, you can begin creating processes to help you hit your diversity targets. Setting targets or goals rather than quotas to aid in increasing an organization’s diversity is an effective way to begin to tackle the problem.

2. Assess and reassess your hiring practices

At its core, effectively cultivating diversity in an organization about hiring and recruiting because your hiring team is at the frontline in tackling this issue. Hiring diverse candidates and being inclusive of your diverse employees is pivotal to a business’ success.

A few key questions you can start with are: What does the hiring process look like at your organization? Is the hiring leader committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion? Who is interviewing candidates, and do those interviewers reflect the diversity you want to portray to prospective new hires? Do you have an objective way to assess candidates that creates a level playing field? Where and how are you sourcing candidates that not only bring relevant skillsets to the role but also unique perspectives?

To further ensure that you are not screening out qualified candidates due to unconscious bias, use skills assessments and standardized interview questions and scorecards. Additionally, if you are looking to hire leadership to build and scale the diversity of your company, executive search firms like ECA provide tailored strategies to uncover diverse qualified candidates.

3. Create a recruiting strategy that prioritizes diversity

Having a recruiting strategy is essential for successful hiring. Prioritizing diversity in your recruiting process does not mean that you are excluding non-diverse candidates in consideration for the role. Rather than thinking about recruiting strategy as a dichotomous diverse vs. non-diverse, your recruiting strategy should focus on ensuring that the messaging and other hiring criteria, such as interviews and assessments, are objective and standardized for all candidates. From the language in your job descriptions to negotiating an offer, all aspects of your recruitment should aim to eliminate bias.

4. Leverage technology as an aid

There are many tech companies that are focused on helping companies diversify their candidate slates through AI. The promise of a data-driven, objective algorithm has led many companies to pour their diversity hopes into the tech bucket, but as the catastrophic incident at Amazon has shown, tech alone cannot solve diversity in the workplace because of machine bias. Despite the presence of machine bias, different technologies and AI/ML platforms, however, can be used as powerful tools to aid in moving along diversity and inclusion initiatives.

Companies utilizing tech should dive deeply into how the algorithms work to ensure that they are aligned with targets and goals. Rather than thinking of tech as the cure-all, tech can enable hiring leaders make better, more empowered decisions.

5. Hire External Consultants

There are times when the above just are not enough to change a company’s DEI landscape whether that is because of lack of leadership buy-in or due to time constraints on the team. It is also important to keep in mind that while you are trying to grow diversity at your company, employees from diverse backgrounds also have limits on their capacity to screen resumes, ask for referrals, and take on interviews along with their role’s responsibilities.

This is precisely when hiring consultants should be brought in to conduct audits, measure your metrics, propose hiring and recruiting strategies, provide a diverse candidate slate, and help screen candidates, but not all hiring consultants provide the same services depending on the seniority and number of roles. For example, if you are trying to hire for a large volume of roles, a company like TalentCompass can assist in providing your hiring leaders numerous qualified diverse profiles. Whereas if you’re hiring for diverse leadership, search firms like ECA and Korn Ferry are strong thought partners in hiring leadership to further push for diversity within the organization along with the bottom line.

Melissa Chan is a Project Manager at ECA. She can be reached at [email protected]