How can your team's recruitment and hiring practices be more inclusive?

1 Define your team's MI mission

Before you start looking for new team members, you need to have a clear and consistent understanding of what MI means for your team and how it guides your work. This will help you craft a compelling and authentic employer brand that showcases your team's mission, values, and culture. You can use MI tools such as the OARS (open questions, affirmations, reflections, and summaries) to engage your current team members in a collaborative dialogue about your team's MI identity, strengths, and areas for improvement.

2 Design your job ads and descriptions with MI in mind

Your job ads and descriptions are the first point of contact with potential candidates, so you want to make sure they reflect your team's MI mission and values. You can use MI techniques such as expressing empathy, highlighting change talk, and avoiding confrontation to craft job ads and descriptions that appeal to candidates who are interested in MI and aligned with your team's vision. For example, you can use open questions to invite candidates to share their MI stories, affirmations to acknowledge their skills and achievements, reflections to show that you understand their motivations and challenges, and summaries to highlight the benefits and expectations of joining your team.

3 Conduct your interviews with MI skills

Your interviews are the best opportunity to assess the fit and potential of your candidates, as well as to build rapport and trust. You can use MI skills such as active listening, eliciting change talk, rolling with resistance, and developing discrepancy to conduct interviews that are respectful, engaging, and informative. For example, you can use active listening to show genuine interest and curiosity in your candidates' experiences, eliciting change talk to explore their goals and values, rolling with resistance to avoid arguing or judging, and developing discrepancy to help them see the gap between their current situation and their desired one.

4 Follow up with your candidates with MI spirit

Your follow-up communication with your candidates is crucial to maintain their interest and enthusiasm, as well as to provide feedback and support. You can use MI spirit, which is based on collaboration, evocation, and autonomy, to follow up with your candidates in a way that respects their choices, empowers their strengths, and fosters their commitment. For example, you can use collaboration to express appreciation and gratitude for their participation, evocation to reinforce their change talk and readiness for change, and autonomy to respect their decisions and preferences.

By using MI principles and techniques in your recruitment and hiring practices, you can create a more inclusive and effective process that attracts, assesses, and retains candidates who are compatible with your team's MI mission and values. This will not only enhance your team's diversity and culture, but also improve your clients' outcomes and satisfaction.

5 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?