How to adjust your hiring process to improve diversity in your workforce

67% of job seekers consider diversity to be an important factor when deciding to work for a company. With this in mind, what are you doing to improve your diversity hiring process?

There are various obstacles, that you may be unaware of, which can make recruiting for diversity harder than it seems. Whilst they are unintentional, unconscious biases can prevent you from being a diverse recruiter and need to be mitigated.

Companies with diverse workforces are 35% more likely to experience greater financial returns, but that’s not the only benefit of diversity in the workplace. Advantages of having a diverse team include:

A greater range of skills and experience

Increased cultural awareness

Higher productivity, creativity and innovation

Improved decision-making

However, 57% of employees feel that their company could do more when it comes to recruiting for diversity. Follow diversity and inclusion recruitment practices to avoid being one of these companies. Here’s our guide to becoming a diverse recruiter.

Creating a diversity hiring process

Write inclusive job ads

When writing job ads, use inclusive language to appeal to a wide and diverse audience. Avoid using gendered terms, and where possible, don’t list job requirements that exclude certain demographics. For example, if speaking a second language is a genuine requirement of the job, it’s okay to list this. But don’t write that applicants must be bilingual if it is just an added bonus.

Research has shown that, typically, women are less likely to apply for a job if they do not meet all listed requirements. As a guide, list only essential requirements to ensure all demographics are not automatically excluded.

You should also include points in your job ads that encourage diverse applicants to apply. This could include dot points about the benefits of your workplace that show your diverse culture. Or, it could simply be a short statement clarifying that your company is a diverse employer and encourages applicants from diverse backgrounds to apply.

To keep on top of job ad inclusivity, ensure that your job ads are regularly audited so that exclusive job requirements and language don’t slip through the cracks. Job ad audits will also allow you to keep on top of other human errors, and improve the overall quality of your ads, leading to more applicants!

Source candidates from a diverse range of platforms

Different demographics use different platforms to look for jobs. As part of your diversity hiring process, advertise your job across all platforms to attract a wide range of applicants.

You should also look beyond advertising on job boards and consider where else you can advertise your vacancy. Other places to consider are social media and your company website.

Consider implementing aspects of blind recruitment

We all like to think that we don’t have any biases when it comes to diversity. But, the truth is that sometimes unconscious biases impact the recruitment process, and we’re not even aware of it. To eliminate these unconscious biases, consider implementing some aspects of blind recruitment.

The first step to blind recruitment is reading blind CVs. Have someone remove or hide any personal information from the resume that can give away the candidate’s identity such as their name, date of birth, address and school. A recruiter can then read each candidate’s resume, without any unconscious biases impacting what they think of each candidate.

If you find that you are still struggling with unconscious biases beyond this stage, extend blind recruitment further with blind screenings and interviews. To do this, create a set list of questions that will be used and unaltered in every interview and screening for the same job.

Diversity and inclusion recruitment best practices

Encourage referrals

Your employees are likely to have networks of people outside of work that are from similar diverse groups to them. Each of these people are an opportunity to increase your workforce’s diversity.

To benefit from their connections, you should encourage employee referrals. The best way to do this is to create a refer-a-friend program to incentivise them. At Fuse, we offer our employees a $2K bonus if we place their referral in an internal role.

A referral program will not only help you to improve your diversity, but it is also a great way to source reliable candidates, and combat candidate shortages .

Offer flexible and remote working arrangements

There are candidate segments that require flexible or remote working arrangements and can only consider working in roles that offer them. For example, this could include parents of young children who need to work flexible hours or people who live in remote communities that are unable to travel to work in the office.

Offer flexible working arrangements to attract all demographics and promote this as a benefit of working for your company. Include this perk in your job ads and your careers web-page, as candidates that are searching for a remote or flexible role will be looking out for this.

Alter company policies to be more inclusive

Have a read over your existing company policies and think about how these include your diverse employees. Could they be improved to better cater to certain employees? Some things to consider are:

• Do you have an Equal Employment Opportunity policy?
• Does your workplace harassment policy have a specific subsection for discrimination based on gender, race, sexuality, age, and religion?
• Is your leave policy inclusive of employees from different religions, who would prefer to take different days off than the Australian public holidays?

Create an inclusive company culture

Hiring diverse candidates is only the first step to creating a diverse workforce. To retain diverse candidates, your workplace needs to be a safe place for people from minority groups and it must accept and celebrate all diverse backgrounds.

Create an inclusive company culture by running diversity training sessions. Educate your employees on different cultures, gender inclusivity, the LGBTQIA+ community and more. It’s also a good idea to give your employees regular opportunities to share their diversity with their colleagues.

For example, our Melbourne team have a weekly team lunch where everyone gets a chance to cook a dish to share. This is the perfect opportunity for our employees from diverse backgrounds to introduce others to an aspect of their culture!

Our Fuse consultants are all experienced, diverse recruiters, and are experts in diverse recruitment in their industries. If you need help with diverse recruitment, fill in the form on this page and one of our consultants will be in touch.