8 Best Practices for Diversity Hiring

To put it in the words of McKinsey & Co.: “The business case for Diversity & Inclusion is stronger than ever”. There is no denying the benefits of a culturally diverse workplace, and the results a diverse workforce can achieve on behalf of an organization.

As a recruiting leader, I find that Talent Acquisition is uniquely positioned to move the needle on Diversity at a foundational level.

If recruiting teams act as diversity advocates when working together with the business, they have the power to address any potential imbalances and to grow the company’s wealth of diversity with every single hire.

At Pitch , my team and I took full advantage of this position: over the course of 18 months (during which we doubled the company headcount with a heavy focus on tech hiring), we managed to increase the number of gender-diverse hires by 51%. This achievement brought our overall hiring gender balance incredibly close to parity!

If you are a recruiter (or hiring manager) yourself, here are a couple of “reflexes” we implemented. Hopefully, they will help you move the needle in your context, too!

Provide an inclusive interview experience

?????Make your job descriptions inviting, not exclusive. To encourage a wide range of diverse and talented candidates to apply, always review your job ads for tone, language, and content. Beware of gender coding, or any language that could make people feel excluded or discriminated against.

Make sure to remove nonessential requirements (aka nice-to-haves) and refrain from using internal corporate jargon. Ask for many different pairs of eyes to review your draft; use a gender-decoder tool, and NEVER re-use an existing role spec without giving it a makeover.

???Assume your hiring team is totally new to interviewing. A skilled and aware interviewer can provide a great candidate experience. Some basics of human interaction sometimes get forgotten, and recruiting teams need to constantly remind interviewers of proper interview etiquette. There are no natural-born interviewers, so take the time to provide your hiring teams with the necessary resources to do their interviewer job well, even if you have to repeat yourself from time to time. Candidates will thank you for it.

???Leave no room for biases. Unconscious biases have a way of creeping into hiring decisions, so educate folks on common pitfalls and take precautions to reduce them. From a process perspective, this may mean anonymizing CVs or coding assignments; encouraging interviewers to form their own unbiased opinion by hiding previous interview feedback; and leading interview de-briefs with the help of an unbiased moderator.

???Stop using a homogenous pool of interviewers. You keep praising your company’s diversity… And meanwhile, your candidates are only meeting cis-gender white males during their interview process. That makes your claims of a diversity-minded company very difficult to believe from a candidate's perspective! Always make sure to feature interviewers from various teams and personal backgrounds. Having a diverse interview panel also makes for a more democratic and balanced hiring process.

Drive awareness and align processes from within

???Challenge your hiring managers on team composition. Spend time reinforcing the value of diverse teams with your hiring managers. After all, diverse workforces make companies more innovative and better positioned to succeed globally. So before kicking off a recruiting process, take a look at the team makeup with your hiring manager: are there many similar profiles on the team already? What backgrounds and diverse perspectives might be missing? During the candidate selection, encourage hiring managers to keep an open mind and challenge them to try different approaches.

???? Invest more time in sourcing to proactively diversify your pipeline. Consider working positions “under cover” for a minimum of [x] weeks before opening them up to the public. This allows recruiting teams to proactively source, approach, and activate diverse talent that otherwise might not actively apply to a job posting.

???Make extra time to answer your candidates’ questions. Candidates may have follow-up questions, require a little more hand-holding, or additional selling efforts during the recruitment process. As a recruiter, you should commit to connecting candidates with the right people so they can gain insight into the topics they care about most. So-called “sell-calls” are often seen badly by the hiring teams, but given the current climate, I can guarantee you that they will make a difference in getting great, diverse talent on board!

??Do not make offers on a first-come-first-serve basis. Active applicants tend to be enthusiastic about swiftly moving through the recruiting stages. Passive candidates, on the other hand, are candidates you approach directly, as they are not actively looking for a job.

Through my experience, I’ve learned that many diverse candidates are passive. For them, expect the interview process to take a little longer, and to require additional touch-points.

Raise awareness around the fact that process timelines between active and passive candidates are often at odds. Align the timelines as best as possible; enlist hiring teams into sell calls, and do not make offers without having interviewed a selection of candidates.

With all that being said, I’d be curious to hear of any additional suggestions when it comes to tackling diversity from a hiring point of view — feel free to engage in the comments!