Estelle Liotard

Companies around the world are thriving to make their work environment more diverse. Take Pinterest, for example. Last year, the company made a commitment to diversify their workplace and recruitment strategy. Among the goals that they set for 2019, they planned to increase:

• hiring rates for full-time women engineers to 25%
• hiring rates for underrepresented minority engineers to 8%
• hiring rates for underrepresented minority employees in business and product development departments to 12%

The results of their diversity strategy exceeded their expectations. Pinterest was able to increase all the above-mentioned indexes to 27%, 9%, and 14% respectively. 

Unfortunately, Pinterest’s example is among those few, who readily invest in diversifying their diversity recruitment strategies. In reality, many companies still remain unresponsive to this tendency. 

According to the Harvard Business Review, 78% of employees report the lack of diversity in leadership. And, without diverse leadership, the source reports that women are 20% less likely than men to win endorsement for their ideas. 

Benefits of Diversity in the Recruitment Strategy

As you can see, many companies still fail to recognize the potential of diversifying their recruitment process. And there are a lot of benefits they can get from it:

• a higher representation of women in C-suite results in 34% greater returns to shareholders
• organizations with above-average gender diversity outperform their competitors by 46% to 58% 
• companies with higher-than-average diversity have 19% bigger innovation revenues

Apart from these convincing numbers, diversifying your recruitment strategy today is a must-do investment for your company if you don’t want to lose authority in your industry. 

So, what can you do to make your recruitment strategy more diverse? Let’s take a look. 

1. Revisit Your Recruitment Policies

How inclusive is your recruitment strategy?

If you want your employees to adapt your workplace to another culture, you need everybody to follow the same rules of recruitment that recognize inclusivity and diversity.

You don’t have to build a new recruitment strategy from scratch, it’s enough to include a few elements that will help make it more diverse. 

Here’s what you can do:

• Introduce blind resumes and blind interviews – Blind resumes presuppose that a candidate removes all contact information, and blind interviews mean that recruiters evaluate candidates anonymously. Both are great strategies to remove intentional or unconscious bias from the recruiting process. 
• Involve diverse people in the recruitment process – In order to practice diversity in your recruitment strategy, this process should be run by people who represent this diversity. Introducing different individuals to this process will allow you to get different perspectives and approaches to hiring diverse candidates. 
• Change scheduling policies – Candidates, who seek diversity from future employees, might ask you about your tolerance towards different approaches to the work schedule. Make sure that your company recognizes the necessity of flexible hours as well as religious holidays, etc. 

A big part of changing your recruitment strategy towards inclusivity is educating your staff. The new recruitment policy won’t work without the updated professional conduct policy, which should have no tolerance towards discrimination and bias. 

2. Include Targeted Internships 

Launching targeted internships for people from underrepresented groups is a great strategy to make your recruitment strategy more diverse. 

These internships create a new source of candidates from underrepresented groups who can potentially join your staff and make your workplace more diverse. 

Besides, this is also a good way to educate your staff and encourage them to be more tolerant. If your workplace has interns from underrepresented groups regularly joining your staff, it helps reduce employee turnover by up to 30%. 

Many U.S. companies already practice this approach, hiring interns from underrepresented groups to fill different positions:

Big corporations can also offer scholarships for students from underrepresented groups to support their future career development. This will help you create the image as a company that supports cultural values and diversity in society. 

How to promote your targeted internships and scholarships?

If you have a good social media strategy, you can regularly make posts about upcoming internships for underrepresented groups. You can also run relevant recruitment ads on these platforms. 

You can also contact local minority organizations and ask them to share the information about your internships and scholarships. 

3. Diversify Your Recruitment Ads

Take a close look at your ads. Do they show your potential candidates that your workplace is diverse? How do they show it? 

To make sure that your recruitment ads promote workplace diversity, study your target audience first. 

Who do you want to see this ad and respond to it? 

Which minority groups are the primary receivers of this ad?

Answering these questions will help you shape your ad and find the right platform, where you will place it. Many companies still think that an ‘inclusive’ picture in the recruitment ad is enough to create a sense of diversity in the workplace. However, a recruitment ad that promotes diversity is not only about the picture, but also about the message that it sends. 

Take a look at how Atlassian shaped their recruitment ad to show that their goal is to create a diverse workplace:

As you can see, Atlassian’s ad promotes diversity with a message that has an emphasis on unique contributions from diverse staff members and why it is meaningful to the company. 

In your ad, your task is to recognize the potential of hiring candidates from minorities and underrepresented groups and why it is important for your business and for modern society. 

You can also adjust your social media strategy to recruit candidates from underrepresented groups. There, you can find more potential candidates by simply targeting them with your content. 

Take a look at how Hubspot is doing it on their Instagram page @hubspotlife.

Besides uploading diversity reports, they also give a chance to every employee from underrepresented groups to take over this Instagram page for one day. This helps show potential candidates that Hubspot has a diverse work environment. 

You can do the same with your social media strategy. Potential candidates browse through your social media channels to evaluate your approach to diversity in recruitment, and social media gives you a great opportunity to show that. 

Over to You

Making your recruitment strategy more diverse is no longer a choice, it’s a must-do thing for every company around the world. 

Whether you’re ready to change your recruitment strategy towards diversity or not, keep in mind that it will give you more benefits in the industry and help you stand out from the competition. 

If you don’t know where to start, try to review your recruitment policy first. To expand your diversity recruitment strategy further, you can create targeted internship opportunities and scholarships. 

And, since many candidates get introduced to your company through recruitment ads, make sure that they recognize and promote diversity, and encourage the candidates from underrepresented groups to apply for a job with your company.