8 Key Tips For Improving Your DEI Hiring Policy

What Hiring Diverse Talent Means

When it comes to diversity hiring and your business, inclusion is the bare minimum. It’s not just about hiring different races, genders, etc., it’s about ensuring that everyone who applies to your open roles has an equal and open opportunity.?

It’s also about being critical and unbiased when it comes to your hiring techniques, ensuring that every step of the process focuses on the quality of the candidate, not their race, gender, or ethnicity.?

How to Remove Bias From Your Hiring Process

We’ve discussed this in-depth before. Often, even experienced recruiters can mistake unconscious biases for gut instinct, excluding a candidate for reasons they can’t entirely put their finger on.?

One of the best ways of avoiding unconscious bias is including this question in your hiring process:?

“Do I have a specific reason for excluding this candidate?”

If you can’t answer that question, your feeling is coming from unconscious bias. Our key steps to hiring diversely and avoiding these pitfalls are:?

1. Create a strong, clear interview process
2. Anonymise as much as possible?
3. Look at skills and abilities, not personal information?
4. Remember that intuition that cannot be explained is more often than not a bias
5. If your hiring manager rejects a candidate, ask why?
6. Break down their answers and write them down in a shared document
7. Then, ask them: ''Give me two reasons why you are rejecting this candidate”
8. Document your process so it can be used for every future hire

One of the most important assets you can have in hiring diversely is scorecards.?

With clear metrics and measurements, you can fully assess why you liked or disliked the candidate, and why exactly you are choosing to hire or exclude them. It also levels the playing field, ensuring that every candidate is assessed by the same metrics.

Additionally, and more importantly, it also ensures that no matter who is interviewing the candidate, they are being assessed by the same metrics.?

This is vitally important if you want to ensure that you hire diversely and with equal opportunity.

It’s also important that when you extend an offer that you do so in a considerate and empathetic manner. Not only does this provide a more open experience for the candidate, but it can also improve your chances of them accepting your offer.?

Everyone Working Together

Hiring Diverse Talent is not the responsibility of one person. Every member of your team must also make it a priority in their recruiting process. But how do you do this??

From Day One, you must make a clear, indestructible recruitment process that your recruitment team fully understands and is on board with.?

Have clear, understandable action points that all of your team can be aligned on. This way, no candidate gets left behind and your whole team can contribute to your hiring process.?

We’ve spoken about this before, but predictability and efficiency not only ensure you have a full pipeline of talent, it also provides a considerably better candidate experience for every applicant.?

If you have a clear, understandable hiring process with logical, unbiased steps, each of your recruiters can offer a hiring process you can be proud of.?

Listen Up?

You will not reach your goals in DEI if you don’t accept and listen to feedback. To do this, you need to focus on three areas:?

• Hired Candidates
• Rejected Candidates
• Employees

As soon as your onboarding process is complete, ask for feedback. Make it anonymous, and make it comprehensive. You need this feedback to be able to improve your hiring process and create a more inclusive experience.?

Rejected candidates, although much less likely to reply, can give you highly valuable information. They are much more likely to be candid in their responses — they’ve nothing to lose.?

Sites like Glassdoor, personalised feedback forms, and even automated email outreaches after the end of the application process can give you golden information about where you’ve dropped short in your hiring process.?

For your employees, no matter the size of the company, you should be sending out anonymous feedback surveys once per quarter — you need an up-to-date temperature check on every sector of your business, and you need it to be honest.?

Diversity can be a really tough topic for many to bring up, especially those who have had a negative experience before.?

Create an open, safe place for people to anonymously present their thoughts, feelings, or problems, to ensure that you get the full, honest picture from your team.?

As Hannelore Cannesa-Wright, one of our Talent Partners and DEI representatives explains:

“When it comes to understanding what Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion mean to your employees and your company, regularly requesting feedback shows that you value their perspectives and the issues which are important to them, and will work continuously to address them.”

Designate

Although everyone in your team should keep DEI in mind at every step of the process, it’s also vitally important that you delegate someone in your company as the chief representative for DEI issues.?

If you’re a small company, this can be a voluntary role. For larger businesses, it will pay off considerably if you choose to hire a DEI specialist to oversee every aspect of not just your hiring process, but your business as a whole.?

Want to learn more? You can find our full guide for hiring diversely on our website.

As an embedded recruitment service, we can also work with you to help create a more diverse hiring process within your company. Reach out to us today to learn more.