Recruiting for Diversity: How to Improve your Strategy

Companies seeking to embrace diversity must focus on developing their diversity recruitment strategies. 

Having various perspectives and backgrounds on your team contributes to fresher and more diverse concepts for solving problems, overcoming challenges, and driving innovation.  Diversity recruiting is all about hiring the most suitable person for the position, regardless of their background.  

Deciding to improve your diversity recruitment strategy should begin with evaluating your company. Start by considering these questions; Is diversity present in your organization? What is your current level of diversity? You can then compare it against existing statistics, which could be national, regional, or even industry figures. By doing this, you can determine where you are as a company, where you hope to go in the future, and monitor your progress at every step of the diversity journey. 

Here are our recommendations for improving your company’s diversity recruitment strategy: 

1. Conduct Job Advertisement Audits 

2. Apply Blind Resumes and Interviews 

3. Use an Applicant Tracking System 

Conduct Job Advertisement Audits  

When you have decided to recruit a diverse range of individuals, you should ensure diversity in the persons applying for your vacant positions. A technique that can be employed to your diverse candidate sourcing strategies is job advertisement audits.  

By auditing your ads, you may notice that your vocabulary was geared to persons of more specific demographic, skill, or experience level. This will allow you to alter your language or tone to appeal to a broader range of candidates from diverse backgrounds. If you aim to target a specific audience, then tailor your message to them, explaining why your organization is a perfect fit for their skill set and experience. 

Apply blind resumes and interviews 

By conducting blind resumes and interview tactics, you eliminate bias in screening. Your diversity recruitment strategy may already produce various applicants, and blind resumes techniques will “blackout” personal information, which may contribute to bias assessments. Personal information may include names, birth dates, location, school/university, and so on. 

Blind interviews involve sending text-based questions to candidates through your recruitment platform, whereby these candidates will answer anonymously. By not including personal details, recruiters will be free of bias. It is recommended and found to be most effective during the early stages of the recruitment process. 

Use an Applicant Tracking System 

In using an Applicant Tracking System (ATS), your company will automate your shortlisting strategy. Thus, it will objectively narrow your list to the most high-potential talents for your advertised vacant positions. By applying the available screening tools in the ATS, you eliminate personal opinions and biases about candidates. It helps you focus on shortlisting candidates best suited to the job description based on experience, potential, and skill set.  

If employed, these recommendations will ensure that your talent pool consists of a variety of talent from different walks of life, which will steer your company towards the diversity that it so desires. 

Stay tuned to our next blog to learn more about creating a diverse workforce! 

Let us help! 

If you are ready to take the next step towards building a diverse workforce, our ITS Global expert team will help you with your recruitment needs. 

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