Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is not a destination, it’s a journey. This journey requires people, processes, and technology to work together to mitigate conscious and unconscious bias where possible at every step possible, create opportunities for underrepresented communities, and build strong teams based on talent wherever it is found.
It’s common knowledge that diversity in the workplace doesn’t simply increase your bottom line. It is a strategic imperative for building a strong employer brand and attracting the best employees to your company. And it’s the right thing to do.
Jobvite Believes Diversity Makes Companies Stronger
Jobvite’s Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) bundle aims to help companies on their journeys to attract and engage more diverse job seekers. D&I has always been important to Jobvite and its clients, but we’ve noticed a renewed desire to create workplaces that embrace job seekers of all ages, races, ethnicities, genders, identities, sexual orientations, locations, and abilities.
So how well does your workforce represent the world we live in? And how do you start finding, welcoming, and hiring diverse talent? Here are eight strategies to attract a wide array of candidates.
8 Steps for Promoting Diversity in Your Company
1. Create a diversity-focused candidate experience, starting with your career site. If you want to attract and hire underrepresented candidates, your career site should reflect that. A good recruitment marketing platform will allow you to publish targeted sub-pages, also known as microsites, on your main career page. These microsites can be used to showcase your commitment to a diverse workforce and provide compelling, relevant content to a wide range of candidates. For example, you can highlight various affinity groups within your company, including those focused on ethnic, gender, and social initiatives.
2. Build content that’s relevant to a variety of audiences. Diversity-focused content doesn’t stop with your career site. Be deliberate with imagery throughout your website to ensure diversity in race, gender, etc. Publish blog content featuring diversity-focused topics and employee spotlights that represent your diverse workforce. Execute email and social media campaigns to demonstrate and reinforce your identity as a company of diverse employees. Create a diversity mission statement and feature it prominently on your website. If you can, highlight diversity awards such as Forbes Best Employers for Diversity.
3. Remove biased language from job descriptions. Research has shown that job descriptions often contain unintentional gender bias — which means you may be missing out on qualified candidates simply because they’re turned off by your job description. For example, terms like “guru,” “ninja,” and “rockstar” have been shown to have a male bias. Other studies indicate that women may not apply for a job unless they are 100% qualified — so avoid including a long list of “nice-to-haves” in your job requirements. Keep in mind, too, that men and women value different things. For instance, a good manager and family-life balance are important to many women, while compensation is the number one priority for most men. Check out this Glassdoor article for more tips.
4. Post to a wide range of job boards. A good recruitment marketing solution will automatically post job openings to job boards, social networks, and agencies without the intervention of a recruiter. Simply set things up so that each time a requisition is opened, it automatically gets posted to job boards that are focused on diversity hiring. This will ensure that diverse applicants see your posting from the outset.
5. Build a proprietary database of diverse candidates. As your organization increases its focus on diversity and inclusion, your CRM database will become a valuable proprietary source for diverse talent. This diverse talent pool is a valuable resource for everyday hiring, making underrepresented candidates more visible to recruiters and helping to meet diversity and inclusion goals across your organization. It also gives you more capability to segment candidates and run targeted, relevant campaigns based on diversity-focused criteria.
6. Offer opt-in talent networks. Creating your own talent networks for diversity groups will allow you to stay in contact with candidates, share relevant information and job opportunities, and build ongoing relationships. When the right job comes along for a given candidate, you’ll have an easy way to get them into the hiring process.
7. Measure and track your diversity efforts. It’s important to know where your best diverse candidates are coming from and how they’re progressing through the hiring process. A good recruitment marketing platform and ATS will provide metrics for every source, program, and campaign to understand where your diverse candidates are coming from and which sources are resulting in diverse hires.
8. Make diversity and inclusion a priority from the top down. Creating a diverse and inclusive workplace doesn’t stop with hiring. It requires a cultural shift, so the entire company understands, supports, and internalizes the value of workplace diversity. Work with your HR team to develop internal messaging around diversity, then build campaigns to educate employees until diversity is an inherent part of your culture. When you take a genuine, authentic approach to diversity, employees and candidates will see the difference right away.
Make DE&I a Priority
The journey to building a diverse and inclusive workforce is challenging, but the payoff is tremendous. Talent acquisition teams are turning to technology to help them hire diverse, qualified talent quickly. So, it’s crucial that they have an in-depth stack of TA software that reduces effort by using automation and AI. Looking to learn more about what Jobvite’s Evolve Talent Acquisition Suite can do for your team? To see Jobvite in action, watch the on-demand Jobvite Product Tour or request a live demo.
