How your recruiter can help your organization source and attract Gender Diverse talent

As a recruiter, my role and responsibilities stretch far wider than simply providing a shortlist of candidates to a client. We often are labelled; career counsellors, sales professionals, market researchers, and in truth recruiters are all these things!

In the last 5 years there has been a 71% increase in the number of “Diversity & Inclusion” positions available in the market, and so this tells us all that D&I is hot on the agenda within businesses across all industries. Ensuring a company is 1. Diverse and 2. Inclusive doesn’t just fall with your internal D&I representative, it is the responsibility of internal leadership, internal communication, and your recruitment partner.

Recruiters must be able to answer questions on culture, they must be able to answer questions about the company’s stance on diversity to potential candidates. They must teach leaders and managers how to think more broadly about their own choices and coach them to gravitate not towards who they “like” but who adds to the organization.

If your company has a poor reputation in terms of culture, as a recruitment partner I have to be able to speak transparently about what the company’s reputation is in the market, to invoke a dialogue about how to improve this. Improvements in this area will give you an opportunity to foster a more diverse skill set, meaning more ideas, innovation, and impact!

Tips for the hiring manager who is trying to drive D&I within their teams:

o  Have an outline of your company’s culture to share with your recruitment partner.

o  Define the current culture within the business

o  What is good about the culture?

o  What as a business are you trying to improve within the culture?

o  What journey have you been on so far to make improvements?

o  Ask your recruitment partner what some of your competitors are doing with regards to D&I

The D&I journey for us all, based on current trends is projected to be a long one! We currently have an estimate that it will take over 200 years to close the global gender pay gap, this can be greatly reduced by asking the right questions, and leaning on your recruitment partner to provide insights on what % of certain profiles are male/female, and devising a clear plan attract diverse backgrounds.

For anyone looking to open a dialogue about what strategies you can look at to improve D&I in hiring new staff within their organization, then feel free to reach out to me directly. Any new ideas, or success stories are always welcome to aid our efforts collectively to improve D&I.

[email protected] (646)833.2684