You can’t get away from the fact that a diverse workforce helps businesses achieve better results by being more creative and innovative – plenty of statistics out there will back this up.
After all, it makes sense that the more varied backgrounds and perspectives you have, the more new and diverse ideas you will have to drive innovation and solve problems. It should be no surprise that more and more companies worldwide are focusing on developing their diversity and inclusivity recruitment strategies.
However, it is important to remember that diversity and inclusion go far beyond business performance and improved results. All companies must strive for it as a step closer to true equality in the workplace.
What is inclusive & diversity recruiting?
The CIPD, Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, defines inclusion as “where people’s differences are valued and used to enable everyone to thrive at work” and diversity as “recognising differences.”
There are two main approaches when it comes to inclusion and diversity:
Inherent diversity related to demographic factors such as age, gender and race
Acquired diversity is related to factors that are developed over time, such as education, skills and values
Inclusive and diverse recruiting, therefore, focuses on ensuring your hiring process is free from bias against individuals or groups of candidates, giving everyone an equal opportunity to be the best candidate.
So, let’s go back to our original question, how do you recruit a diverse and inclusive workforce?
Increasing diversity and inclusion in the workplace
There are lots of ways you can make a difference when it comes to diversity and inclusion, and these include:
- Being more inclusive in the language you use in your job ads to make sure you are appealing to candidates from a wide variety of backgrounds, letting candidates know why you are looking for them and how your company would be a great fit for them
- Encourage your employees to reach out to their networks to create a diverse candidate referral programme – which is also great for overall team morale.
- Apply companywide policies that will appeal to a diverse range of candidates, making sure you look at things like religious holidays, community events and so on.
- Remove personal information from candidates’ CVs so that your team are discouraged from making a biased assessment of the candidate.
- Use blind interviews in the early stages of the recruitment process to remain free of bias regarding who you choose to interview further.
- Ensure your talent pipelines are seeded with diverse candidates to ensure a more even playing field when it comes to choosing who to hire
Diversity recruiting is all about hiring the best person for the job, regardless of their background. Agile Recruit can help you build or become part of a company that helps its employees to thrive. Get in touch with us to find out more.
