Top five tips for improving your diverse hiring

Looking to exemplify Recruitment Best Practice when it comes to attracting, engaging, and retaining diverse talent? We’ve put together a whitepaper, called 'Diversity and Inclusion in Recruitment Strategy: How? What? Why?', on just that – with a few top tips listed here. How many are you already following?

In the whitepaper, we explore the common pitfalls in the end-to-end recruitment lifecycle, with practical advice and recommendations on how to overcome challenges and implement more inclusive processes at every step of the hiring process. Written by our senior leadership team, with input from Cultural Change experts, the guide delivers evidence and experience-based insight to help businesses build more well-rounded workforces. So if you want to build on the top tips listed here, be sure to take a look.

Top five tips for improving your diverse hiring

1. Check for biases in language of role definitions, job advertisements, and external branding. Language is powerful and certain words can resonate or repel candidates. Seek specialist advice, consult with target communities, or use inclusive language applications like Textio to improve the quality of your written copy.

2. Establish diverse interview panels to make and/or review hiring decisions, and ensure that HR and recruitment managers actively participate in decision-making. Hiring decisions should never be made alone; otherwise, expect unconscious bias to subtly filter into the process.

3. If a team’s culture is not inclusive to all its members, a dominant in-group is likely to form. This can impact engagement, performance, and retention of hires that do not fit the mould. To ensure that a culture is inclusive, start at the top – with inclusive leadership.

4. Establish qualitative and quantitative mechanisms for gathering data on diversity performance (including with suppliers) to monitor progress and outcomes. Without insight into leakage of diverse talent, it will be difficult to pinpoint issues and implement changes.

5. Ensure that recruitment suppliers are on the same page and driven by the same motives as you. Brief external recruitment and search providers on your needs and objectives and require agencies to routinely report on their diversity make-up at each stage of the process.

Ready to learn more? Then please check out our whitepaper ‘Diversity and Inclusion in Recruitment Strategy: How? What? Why?’ for more insight into how diversity can impact business performance, how to build a robust strategy for improving diversity, and how to implement changes – with rationale – at every stage of the candidate journey.