Hiring a diverse team provides a variety of perspectives and ideas that will move your business forward. Diverse teams are representative of greater markets and they inherently bring about greater creativity and foster increased innovation, leading to a potential increase in the bottom line.
Hiring a truly diverse team means diversity in gender, sexual orientation, skill level, education, disability, and socioeconomic status in addition to ethnicity.
Hoping to hire a more diverse team? Consider these recommendations:
Take A Step Back: The first step to creating diversity is understanding the true meaning of accurate representation. Ask yourself, “Does my team accurately reflect the proportions of different groups that appear in the real world?” Pinpoint where you feel your company is lacking in terms of diversity and set goals to improve.
Curate a Diverse Team of Interviewers: Porter Braswell, the co-founder of Jopwell, suggests having a diverse team of interviewers who represent a wide array of perspectives. Sometimes companies source diverse candidates, but these candidates do not get hired. This suggests problems internal to the hiring process that need to be re-evaluated. Having a diverse panel of interviewers helps eliminate perpetuating subconscious biases that maybe are existing in the hiring process.
Market Your Company Correctly: How is your company marketing itself to diverse candidates? From how your brand is presented as a whole, to how your job postings are worded, these subtleties can deter certain candidates. Be aware of how company values and culture are being portrayed, ensuring that they reflect those of a diverse array of groups. For example, some candidate segments may require greater flexibility. So if your company touts a highly structured corporate environment, these candidates are less likely to apply.
Expand out of your usual network: The key to diversity is engaging with a variety of social circles, often very different from our own. We surround ourselves with people just like us, so by hiring those we know, either directly or through social connections, inhibits diversity. So, in addition to using referrals to source new talent, use third-party recruiting firms or job boards.
Hire Blindly? Blind resumes and interviews are one of the best ways to decrease implicit bias. What does this mean? The content of a candidate’s application is evaluated separately from their name or appearance, ensuring that each candidate is hired based on their qualifications alone. Even a simple change such as removing names from resumes can help level your hiring playing field.
Group Hiring and onboarding allow diverse hires to feel more at home and connect with other new hires faster. Hiring a diverse team is just as important as retaining a diverse team. By hiring multiple candidates with similar backgrounds, you can help reduce overall employee turnover.
Remember, there are many ways to diversify, and there is more than one type of diversity. Having a greater awareness about how the company projects itself, and the implicit biases that may exist are the first step to creating a more diverse team. It will be a challenge, and one worth overcoming.
We hope you’ve enjoyed the 570th issue of our a.blog.