5-Step Approach for Organizations to Build a Diverse Workforce

5-Step Approach for Organizations to Build a Diverse Workforce

?While ‘workplace diversity’ may have sounded like a mere jargon a few years ago, it has become a major goal for organizations today. A diversified workforce has several benefits to offer, including higher innovation, peer-to-peer learning, variety of perspectives and business goodwill. Diversity in the team can help bring fresh ideas and varied skill sets to the table, encouraging richer conversations, inclusive thought-processes and groundbreaking solutions for your customers.

To achieve this, companies must reduce biases towards their candidates’ gender, cultural background, age, religion, race, sexual orientation or any other personal preference that is unrelated to job performance. This can be done by identifying and diminishing personal biases within your existing team and at the time of recruitment. These biases have the power to create a sense of discrimination and may turn away candidates that would have been a suitable fit for the job. The need of the hour is to create homogenous teams, which requires steps to be taken in the following direction.

1.???Assess current diversity to set create favorable work environment

Before planning your diversity recruitment strategy, it is vital to conduct a hiring audit and re-assess your existing diversity hiring process to look for any faults or potential bottlenecks. Analyze how diverse your team is to get a set realistic overview of where to begin and what recruitment goals to set for the coming year.

For instance, women are equally interested in new career opportunities as men.??LinkedIn’s Gender Insights Report shows that 88% women are interested in new job opportunities, compared to 90% men. Despite that, there is a gaping gender gap, especially in STEM industries. Even as women contribute to improving the gender diversity, those coming back from maternity still struggle to find the work environment conducive to their needs. Parental leave policies can be helpful to not just women, but also to the employers as they help with succession planning, build gender equality and also fill the gender wage gap. Also, gender gap implies that there is a major opportunity to modify your hiring process and work towards a culture that encourages more women in the workforce.

2.???Shortlist one metric to boost your diversity hiring

Attempting to revamp your entire diversity hiring program altogether can get overwhelming. The easiest way to enhance your diversity hiring is to shortlist and choose one metric and begin to work on it. For instance, your focus could be to raise the number of qualified female employees in technology-based roles, or to improve the percentage of qualified minorities on the sales team. You can take one metric at a time and start ticking it off your list gradually.

3.???Conscious improvement of candidate sourcing

If you are failing to draw diverse candidates, maybe it is time to re-word the job description. Using words like ‘dominate’ or ‘challenging’ may ruin your chances of attracting female candidates. To encourage engagement from women, be flexible about the work hours and highlight the benefits that come with the job. Put up pictures and videos the workforce and workplace that convey inclusion. Display testimonials that encourage candidates to apply. You can also encourage minority employees for referrals. This will help as they may refer members from their community, allowing you to boost in the workforce.

4.???Forego preferences during candidate screening

Traditional benchmarks for candidate screening can ruin your aspiration of building a diverse and inclusive team. Candidates’ previous company, their schooling or their connections often become the reason for lack of diversity in your candidate pipeline. Set up pre-hire personality assessment tests for all candidates in order to make the decision-making unbiased. The personality scores of minority groups will not be significantly different, giving you the perfect reason to shortlist a candidate based on his or her persona and traits. Or, you may opt for blind hiring where personal information about candidates is anonymized to avoid bias.

5.????Candidate shortlisting with automated intelligence

Harvard Business Review states that if a candidate pool has two minority candidates, the odds of selecting a minority candidate will be 194 times higher. And if there are a minimum of two female candidates in the pool, the odds of selecting a female are 79 times higher. However, with automated intelligent shortlisting you can eliminate manual intervention and the influences that come with it. The software is part of your ATS and uses your CV database to find out about existing employees’ experience and skills, among other criteria. It objectively applies the criterion across candidates to present the suitable resources based on merit, reducing problems of accidental discrimination and unconscious biases. ?

Unlike humans, machines will not have inherent biases that can inhibit diversity and inclusion. Instead, they are subject to the data inputs and algorithmic features fed to them by people operating them. When appropriately implemented, Artificial Intelligence (AI) can disregard the attributes that cause unconscious biases that are usually hard to determine in decision-making processes. Upon the detection of prejudice, HR or the manager are immediately alerted so they can take corrective measures.

AI tends to play a critical role in two key areas – It ensures that all qualified candidates get equal access to work opportunities and also supports the HR function in taking fair recruitment decisions. Equal access to job opportunities will always remain the first step towards boosting workplace diversity. Taking the necessary steps allows a broad range of candidates to apply to your organization. You can then go on to build highly diverse candidate pipelines and pools.

Make sure to evaluate and quantify your ongoing initiatives to assess the success of your diversity-building strategies. Once you begin to achieve your diversity hiring goal, return to your hiring metrics and re-evaluate your objectives and strategies for future. Repeat the strategies that have proven to be effective and re-iterate the processes for those that didn’t work. Workplace diversity?and inclusion must remain a top priority all businesses, and the hiring for it should be based purely on talent, experience and performance. ??

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