A diverse workforce can be a major benefit for an employer. And diversity certainly isn’t limited to simple gender diversity or race diversity. Diversity in the workplace can mean ensuring that individuals of different ages, sexual orientations, national origins, physical ability levels, religions, and even different upbringings or social backgrounds are included.
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Besides the fact that it’s illegal to discriminate against applicants on a variety of factors, there are also a wide variety of benefits that employers can gain by ensuring they maintain a diverse workforce. Here are a few of those benefits:
- Increased innovation. By bringing in varying perspectives to address workplace challenges, you get more varied and new ideas that could spur innovative processes and products.
- Increased profitability. Similar to the reasons behind increased innovation, by having a diverse set of employees, you are more likely to have new perspectives—which can open doors to new ideas to improve processes and increase profitability overall.
- Improved customer perception. Having a more diverse workforce can make the organization appear to be more inclusive from the customer perspective—thus influencing purchasing decisions.
- Positive employment branding. Having a diverse workplace can create a positive effect on the employment brand, and it can be used as a recruiting tool.
Recruiting for Diversity
So, how can employers ensure that their recruiting process promotes hiring a diverse set of new employees? Fortunately, there are a lot of ways it can be influenced. Here are some tips:
- Ensure that your job postings are not only in places where a very limited demographic will see them. This may mean expanding the number of places where jobs are posted. It may also mean taking a critical look at the demographics of all of the sources currently used and using the information you find to develop a plan to reach a broader audience.
- Pay attention to the benefits on offer for all jobs. If you’re lacking in diversity, it could be because the pay and benefit package are not attractive to differing groups of people. Conduct an assessment of the full pay and benefit package and review how suitable it is for differing groups. Conduct research, if necessary, to see what types of benefits may be appealing that you’re not already offering. For example, it may help to offer more flexible work schedules to allow some groups more of a chance to meet their personal needs outside of work. Or, it may be beneficial to promote your holiday and absence policy if it is one that has the flexibility to accommodate differing religious or cultural needs.
- Watch out for job postings that are inadvertently biased. For example, a job posting may inadvertently appeal more to one gender or another based solely on the choice of words. Some words may appear to be more aggressive or more passive, which may appeal to different candidates. There are online tools that can help you in this assessment.
- Ensure that everyone involved in the hiring process has been trained about avoiding bias and discrimination. While this alone won’t eliminate unconscious bias, it can go a long way toward reducing the biases that keep well-qualified candidates from being considered.
- Train those involved in the hiring process to not make assumptions on what a candidate will or will not desire or accept. For example, the hiring team shouldn’t assume that one candidate may not be willing to travel (if he or she has not said so) because they have a family. Another example might be assuming that a candidate will feel uncomfortable in the work environment for some reason, when he or she has not expressed anything to imply that. In other words, don’t make assumptions that negatively impact a candidate.
This is just the beginning of the list. Come back for tomorrow’s Advisor for more tips on how to ensure your recruiting process results in a diverse candidate pool.