Tips For Improving Diversity In Your Hiring Practices
If you work for the recruitment side of a company, there is a good chance that you have been instructed to make sure that you garner a diverse workforce to ensure that there are a number of different thoughts and ideas in your company. This can be more difficult than it sounds because you want to make sure that you are still getting the best person for each job for which you are hiring, while still taking diversity into account. This can get very tricky. Here are some tips for improving diversity in your hiring practices.
1. Limit Any Implicit Biases
The first thing that you need to do is limit any biases that you might have or that any hiring manager might have. The reason why you want to do this is to make sure that you are not accidentally allowing great candidates to slip away due to irrational biases that everyone has deep down. You can reduce the chances that any biases can manifest by removing all identifying markings from resumes before giving them to recruiters to review. This includes the name, gender, race, or anything else that is not specifically related to a person's skills and work experience. This will allow you to ensure that the hiring practices that your company uses are based solely on skills, allowing you to get the best person for the job, rather than any other factor. Getting rid of identifying features on resumes is known as standardizing the resumes.
2. Recruit From Areas With Diversity
If you are primarily recruiting from colleges that have a vast majority of one race, then you are not going to even have the option to choose people with different ways of thinking. This is going to result in any standardizing efforts that were discussed above to be largely useless. Be sure that you are recruiting from areas that have many different races and religions in order to ensure that people who are different than the majority of people working at your company even apply.
3. Check Your Word Usage
If you are trying to recruit more people of a specific gender, you might need to check how your job ads are worded. There are services online that you can put your ad into that will tell you how many masculine and feminine words you have. If you are trying to recruit more of one gender, you will want to increase the number of words that are associated with that gender in the ad to encourage more people of that gender to apply.
For more information, talk to a company that specializes in a interactive diversity program.
