What if your company’s next great innovation isn’t just about innovation, but the diversity of the team that made it happen?
If you've noticed, modern-day workplaces are undergoing an interesting metamorphosis. As they are shrinking in the palm of your hand with the constant globalization, they are simultaneously growing to unthinkable heights with the ideas of an increasingly diverse and interconnected work culture.
At this point in 2024, it is a given that building a high-performing workforce needs you to make the best hires, and requires a shift in traditional recruitment practices. Inclusive recruitment is no longer a buzzword; it's a strategic imperative that companies are taking in their stride to not only hike their growth but also to add their two cents to society and make an impact.
It's about creating a level playing field where everyone, regardless of their background and any other bias, but based only on their merit and capability has an equal opportunity to contribute to the collective success of a company. By embracing Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DE&I) practices in the hiring process, companies can actively build an impressionable image attracting diverse top talents during recruitment drives.
A 2014 study by Bersin revealed that employees who perceive their organization as committed to diversity and inclusion report an 83% increase in innovation, a 31% improvement in responding to customer needs, and a 42% boost in team collaboration. Thus, companies must explore what inclusive recruitment truly means and delve into strategies to implement it effectively.
What is Inclusive recruitment?
Inclusive hiring practices are a set of recruitment strategies that ensures equal opportunities for all candidates, regardless of their background, race, gender, ethnicity, age, disability, sexual orientation, or other protected characteristics.
The approach is to drive away unconscious bias and create a transparent, uninclined recruitment process. The goal of consciously shifting to an inclusive recruitment program is to create a workplace where everyone feels valued, and respected and has the chance to succeed.
Now, several laws are in place to guarantee accepting and unbiased work environments. However, inclusive recruitment goes beyond simply complying with equal opportunity laws. It's about building a diverse workforce that reflects the communities served by the employer in turn strengthening the company culture, highlighting their contribution to a more equitable society at large.
Why is inclusive recruitment necessary in 2024?
Reports indicate that inclusive and diverse talent teams secure an upper hand of 36% success over their competitors when it comes to fulfilling their goals. Now, in 2024 when the world is coming together with calls for equal engagement and fostering a diverse work environment, inclusive recruitment is the way to go.
If we even cut out on the probability of straight-cut success for your team, a Deloitte study shows that diversity of thought in the workplace amounts to a 30% hike in innovation and a 20% growth in risk identification and management. It is a no-brainer that the only way to have a workplace with diversity of thought is through inclusive recruitment practices.
Thirdly, when you look at the hiring initiatives of companies that have not strategically invested in inclusive recruitment as a strategy, there is always a tinge of unconscious bias. This directly affects your target candidate base in the first place narrowing down diversity and the probability of efficiency in the talent pool you end up investing in.
Talking about government benefits for companies hiring specially-abled individuals, there are schemes like the Disabled Access Credit, Barrier Removal Tax Deduction, and the Work Opportunity Tax Credit among others. These schemes are not only beneficial to small-scale organizations but also to established corporations who are looking to build a diverse, inclusive workplace.
Steps to Execute an Inclusive Recruitment Strategy
Creating a truly inclusive recruitment process is essential for building a diverse and equitable workforce. However, it sure does not happen overnight. Implementing inclusive recruitment strategies in your workplace requires ongoing training and supervision. Nonetheless, here are key stepping stones to help you achieve this goal:
Define Your Diversity and Inclusion Goals
Before diving into the recruitment process, clearly define your employer brand’s diversity and inclusion goals. What does a diverse workforce look like for your company? What are the specific underrepresented groups you want to target? Having clear goals will help guide your recruitment efforts.
Now, the answers to these questions vary from company to company. For example, if your employer’s brand is a food processing agency from the USA that is marketing its products globally, you should ideally be on the outlook for culturally diverse people who can add their perspectives on marketing and production to enrich the brand’s acceptability in different parts of the world.Conduct a Diversity Audit
Assess your current workforce to identify areas where diversity is lacking. This is because auditing will help you understand the gaps and tailor your recruitment strategies accordingly. While you’re at it, you might also survey the side to gather input from your employees about how they think you can bridge the gaps in this regard.
Once you have the audit on your hands, use the data to determine and manipulate your hiring strategies accordingly to attract and invest in the top talent irrespective of any unconscious bias.
Develop Inclusive Job Descriptions
Use inclusive language in your job descriptions. There are certain jargon or outdated modes of writing that might give off the idea of a negative or overtly positive bias towards certain classes, religions, sexual orientation, and so on. To prevent this mistake and attract a healthy applicant pool, avoid gendered terms or stereotypes. Focus on essential qualifications and skills rather than any preferences you might have.
Expand Your Talent Pool
Cast a wider net to attract a diverse pool of candidates. Not every age-old route takes you to your destination quickly. So, keeping in trend with the demographic you’re targeting with the job advertisements, utilize job boards, social media platforms, and professional networks accordingly.
Make sure to include branding costs on running job ads on resources that cater to underrepresented groups. If you think this is a bit of a stretch in terms of research and otherwise, partner with diversity organizations and attend industry events focused on diversity and inclusion to understand the pain point better and alleviate it.
Implement Bias Training
After you are done setting up the research-intensive checkpoints to incorporate inclusive recruitment practices, remember, “Charity begins at home”. So, educate your hiring team about unconscious bias and its impact on the recruitment process. Provide training on inclusive interviewing techniques and fair assessment practices and evaluate each member to create a checkpoint before they reach out to the candidates in real.
What this does is, it eliminates all bias from your team of interviewers and guarantees that the interview process is fair for all candidates. This not only impresses the applicant pool but also makes it bigger and attracts top talents.
Use Diverse Interview Panels
Assemble diverse interview panels to reduce bias and provide different perspectives on candidates. This not only helps candidates recalibrate their experience with your company irrespective of the hiring outcome but also builds a sense of reliability among them.
Again, ensuring that all candidates feel welcomed and valued throughout the recruitment process is just another side to this coin of an immersive and inclusive candidate experience. Provide clear communication, timely feedback, and accessible application processes to have your employer’s brand spread in good word among a number of people.
Establish Diversity Metrics
After you have achieved these few steps to inclusive recruitment, make sure to track diversity metrics and measure the effectiveness of your inclusive recruitment efforts as hiring managers.
Regularly analyze the demographics of your applicant pool, hires, and workforce to keep yourself abreast of every development or challenge coming your way. Remember to always be inclusive and thoughtful about all these challenges and broaden your horizon of thought to not stick to the pillow and plight of one particular group at the workplace.
How Skima Propels Your Inclusive Recruitment Strategies
Skima provides recruiters with an opportunity to identify and assess candidates objectively. It employs a mix of modern machine learning technologies and artificial intelligence techniques to comprehensively understand your job requisites. Based on it and millions of data points its LLM is trained on, the platform creates ideal candidate personas. These personas are then used to identify the best-fit candidates from your candidate pool.
With a streamlined and simplified dashboard, you can view each of these candidates, with their relevance to the job role via AI Matching Score. The higher the score the more relevant a potential candidate is to the job role. This allows for an objective and unbiased hiring practice that promotes inclusivity.
Wrapping Up
Building an inclusive recruitment process is not just a moral imperative anymore but rather a strategic business decision. By prioritizing diversity, equity, and inclusion in your hiring practices, you create a workplace where everyone feels valued, and respected, and has equal opportunities to succeed.
Let's reshape the future of work, one inclusive hire at a time.
