8 Tips to Hire a More Diverse Workforce

Building a diverse team is not only the right thing to do, but it has also proven to provide numerous business benefits:

• Greater innovation
• Better understanding of your customers
• Improved employee engagement
• Richer perspectives
• Better company reputation
• Reduced churn

In short, diversity is good for your employees, your customers, and your bottom line. Let's look at eight strategies you can use to recruit a more diverse workforce.

Revise Your Job Ads
Language matters. Are the words you're using in your job ads representative of the diverse talent pool you hope to attract? Only list essential requirements that are truly essential. You may notice that some of the language you use is more geared toward a specific demographic or background. For example, the use of "Salesman" in a job title. "Salesperson" or "Sales Rep" would be better alternatives.

Adopt the Blind Resume Review Process
A blind hiring process involves anonymizing identifiable characteristics from a resume that are not related to the job or experiences needed for success. By hiding certain characteristics like age, gender, ethnicity, name, or level of education, you can remove the different cognitive biases that may be present for those reading the resume.

Recognize Unconscious Bias
Recruiters should be trained in recognizing unconscious bias, as well as in conducting standardized interviews. Unconscious bias in job postings includes using text or media that excludes someone. An example is a job description that uses "English Fluency Level: Native", excluding a person who speaks English as a second language. Confirmation bias is the tendency to embrace information that confirms one's existing beliefs while rejecting information that challenges them.

Create More Flexible Company Policies
Are your company policies based on certain assumptions about what your employees' lives look like? When you consider different cultural norms, you may be surprised. Whenever you implement or revise a policy such as paid holidays, ensure that a diverse range of people get to have input on it.

Ensure Diversity on Your Interview Panels
Even with the best intentions in the world, a homogenous shortlisting team or interview panel will struggle to effectively recruit a diverse workforce.

Ask All Candidates the Same Questions
You want to compare apples to apples. Use the same set of interview questions, asked in the same order, for every candidate. Assign weighted scores to the questions and compare candidates side-by-side.

Encourage Your Employees to Refer Their Connections
In general, people's social and professional networks are made up of individuals who are demographically similar. Encouraging diverse candidate referrals is a great way to both boost your diversity recruitment strategy and showcase that your company values different backgrounds and ideas.

Pick One Metric to Improve for Your Diversity Hiring
Trying to overhaul your diversity hiring metrics can be overwhelming. The simplest way to improve diversity hiring is to focus on one metric to improve upon. For example, increasing the percentage of qualified female employees in tech-related roles by 10% within six months. When you have achieved success in that metric, move on to the next one.