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Is your company struggling to hire diverse talent? As diversity and inclusion (D&I) goals change and grow each year, many organizations find themselves wondering whether their D&I efforts in hiring are, in fact, the best use of their finite energy and resources. But make no mistake: hiring diverse talent has a direct and positive impact on your bottom line. That’s because, including a wide range of backgrounds, experiences, skill levels, and worldviews in your workforce makes everyone better.
These three practices can help any organization find the diverse talent it needs:
Drawing from the same pools of candidates over and over is likely to produce candidates with similar backgrounds, experiences, education levels, and skills. By expanding your reach, you can find candidates whose abilities diverge from the norm, allowing for more inclusive perspectives on your team and fresh approaches to tackling business challenges.
The best sourcing toolset is broad and deep, allowing recruiters to connect to a wide range of individuals with the necessary skills and unique life experiences to contribute to their clients’ teams. Creative sourcing is one of the best techniques for clients seeking ways to build more diverse teams.
Many employers are aware of the need to address conscious bias in the hiring process to ensure that candidates are hired based on criteria directly affecting their performance. Fighting unconscious bias is more difficult. These biases can affect hiring because they lurk below conscious awareness, making them more challenging to spot.
Yet safeguarding against unconscious bias is essential in hiring a diverse team.
To address unconscious bias in hiring, consider using blind hiring options. Removing identifying information like names, addresses, and indicators of gender from applications or resumes, for example, helps to ensure that each candidate’s skills and abilities stand out. By focusing attention on these factors, companies can hire based on performance and performance alone. That way, there’s little chance of bias – unconscious or otherwise – seeping into the process and affecting the results.
While hiring a more diverse team is a worthwhile aspiration, reaching this goal requires more than identifying this need. To ensure an organization is finding diverse, qualified candidates, it needs to set specific goals and metrics to track the success of its efforts.
For example, an organization seeking to build a more diverse hiring process may begin by analyzing past hiring decisions to determine the areas needing change. The talent acquisition leadership may also use a recruiting organization specializing in identifying and fixing problems that may be preventing a diverse hiring process.
To find diverse talent, many organizations need to rethink their hiring practices. It starts with expanding the source of your candidates so that you’re not drawing from the same candidate pool repeatedly. Eliminating unconscious bias in your screening and hiring process is also essential to finding diverse talent. Finally, setting measurable and concrete diversity and inclusion goals holds your organization to account for its efforts.
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