The next time your company is looking to find the right candidate for an open position, ask yourself the following question: Are you casting a wide enough net in order to find the best available talent from an equitably diverse pool of applicants? In today’s business climate, having a diversity and inclusion hiring strategy is absolutely mission-critical for your hiring managers and HR personnel.
Simply put, improving your business’s diversity and inclusion initiatives across your teams will ultimately enhance the range of perspectives you’ll have at your disposal to leverage—which offers obvious benefits to your bottom line. It will also help ensure that your job openings get filled with the absolute best and brightest talent available across a wide demographic spectrum, which is an objective win-win for your business and for applicants who may have historically had less exposure to the same opportunities.
While you may think you absolutely agree with this philosophy, you may also be thinking that you’re doing everything you can to keep your job searches free from bias, and your job listings free from things that narrow the playing field cause some potential applicants to feel excluded. But that may not be entirely true—and the truth is that you may not even be consciously aware of the full impact of the choices you make when crafting new job listings. So keep reading, and consider this an opportunity to pause, reflect, and possibly retool and improve your diversity and inclusion hiring strategy moving forward.
Avoid Exclusion
Even if you don’t know it at first glance, you may be using language in your job listings that cause applicants to feel they may not be eligible for an open position based on some demographic characteristics they possess. This type of language can come in many forms, from the overt (i.e., an age requirement, gender-biased terminology, etc.) to something that may seem minor but have a real impact on your audience (i.e., the use of male- or female-centric pronouns, etc.). Before sharing your job listings with the world, make sure that they are inclusive, inviting, and free from any coded language that may indicate bias or that can inadvertently cause applicants to feel excluded.
Post Wisely
Make sure your decisions regarding where to share your job listings don’t inadvertently signal a bias towards—or against—a certain demographic. For example, a brand new job board aimed at attracting young and tech-savvy freelancers might draw in this specific group, but older and more experienced candidates with clear value propositions may be left out of consideration. The bottom line here is to spread the news of your job opening far and wide across a variety of venues in an effort to catch as wide and diverse of an applicant pool as possible—which will increase the likelihood that you’ll come across the ideal candidate to meet your needs.
Leverage New Technology
Today’s innovative hiring tools have the power to improve the recruitment process and open things up to a larger and more diverse pool of applicants. According to a recent article by Harvard Business Review, cutting-edge AI can help take your hiring strategy to the next level by eliminating unconscious prejudice and allow for an unbiased assessment of your entire candidate pipeline, freeing time-constrained and overworked hiring personnel to focus on other crucial tasks.
Think this sounds like something that will hopefully be available one day in the distant future? Think again—tools like pandoIQ’s job expansion feature uses AI-enabled predictive algorithms and machine learning to intelligently automate and optimize your job posting strategy; the job expansion feature, for example, empowers every search with variants of each job listing to help you attract a wider and more diverse array of candidates across more posting sites for every open position. The even better news is that these AI tools will continue to evolve and get more effective as they learn and become more sophisticated and refined.
In addition to benefitting from the talents, backgrounds, and perspectives of a broader applicant pool, having a company with a more diverse workforce will help attract new active and passive job seekers for future positions. According to a recent report by Glassdoor, job seekers consider more than just salaries and benefits when evaluating potential positions:
“A full two-thirds (67 percent) of active and passive job seekers said that a diverse workforce is an important factor when evaluating companies and job offers. That means that whether or not your company is interested in increasing its diversity and inclusion, chances are that candidates are evaluating diversity when they research your company and during the interview process.”
Hopefully, by now it’s obvious that there are many compelling reasons for opening up your hiring strategy to include a wider range of diverse applicants. Use the strategies and advice presented here to help ensure that your job listings are helping you to achieve this goal.