Why Companies Need To Diversify Their Hiring Process

Having a diverse workforce is as important as ROI; it should become a priority for all organizations. Gartner Inc. predicts by 2022, 75% of companies with diverse and inclusive decision-making teams will exceed their financial targets.?

To put it straight, it all begins with the team you build from the hiring practices you deploy. It requires solutions to common barriers: innate and unconscious bias within the hiring team, a narrow funnel from which applicants are selected, or having access to power.?

Although, the good news is that there are ways that would help you diversify your hiring process in the best form. What are they?

1. Auditing - Assess your current hiring process and look for discrepancies. What strengths and challenges do you face while making the improvisations? It will help you understand where you need to improvise and focus and guide you to break down the essentials and work on them.?

2. Starting point - After you have audited your hiring process, you need to start by focusing on one metric at a time. One step at a time would help you make the process simpler and more efficient. For example, you wish to increase the percentage of qualified female employees in X position by X% within X period. Target to work on that to make this goal a reality.

A study from Hewlett Packard’s Internal Report shows that - Men apply for a job when they meet only 60%, but women apply only if they meet 100% of them. A Forbes article puts it this way saying, “Men are confident about their ability at 60%, but women don’t feel confident until they’ve checked off each item on the list.” Advice: Women need to have more faith in themselves.?

3. Candidate Sourcing - You need to increase diversity when sourcing candidates. The first step would be rewording the job description; a minor tweak here and there would help showcase a more diverse approach. It would, however, make it or break it for potential candidates. The fundamental rule of diversity is that - Diversity attracts diversity, so you should take decisive steps to showcase diversity through the various social media posts, videos, websites, and other forms of content. For U.S. companies, a study found racial and ethnic diversity on the corporate boards of large-caps had a significant positive impact on stock price: The difference in returns between stocks of companies with the highest number of people of color on their boards and those with the least was 1.5%.

4. Candidate Screening - While hiring a candidate, the first few things that employers tend to look at are, prior employment, schooling, and other factors which influence their decisions largely—furthermore, discounting the diversity aspect of the process. Instead, the approach you should take is to conduct pre-hiring assessments to help increase workplace diversity and implement the usage of hiring software, which would decrease or omit any kind of obstruction to increasing diversity in the hiring process.

“You can’t categorize diversity based on what a person looks like. It’s what the person can do for the organization.” -Charles K Poole.

5. Evaluate - Once the process comes to its completion, you should refer back to the guidelines and outcomes you set for yourself and figure out if they were achieved or not? Were the discussed strategies implemented, the loopholes, how could the process be more effective? These are a few areas that you should look into. A tip here to be more efficient is by collecting data before and after the implementation of the process. This will only aid in making the strategies more effective for future hiring.

At Kapital Data, we help our clients get the best fit for their open positions. We refer to our placements as DreamHires. It is a promise we do not take lightly. If you are looking at diversifying your process and implementing the new-age hiring methods, we could step in to help you figure it out.?

Reach out to us via email, or book a meeting with us. You can also follow us on LinkedIn and check out our website to dive into more about us and our services.