Recruiting and hiring strategies to support your diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts

Workplace diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs are voluntary initiatives beyond anti-discrimination and harassment programs that are compliance-based. As the name suggests, DEI describes three critical components:

• First, you need “diversity,” which relies on attracting, recruiting, hiring, and retaining a diverse workforce;
• The “equity” component means ensuring nondiscrimination and equal employment opportunities; and
• “Inclusion” requires building a respectful, supportive, and inclusive environment that allows all employees to thrive at work.

You can make many key changes in your recruiting and hiring efforts that should lead to significant and persistent increases in workforce diversity and opportunity.

Recruiting strategies

The goal of examining your hiring process with a focus on diversity isn’t about hiring people just because they are a member of a group that is underrepresented in your organization. It’s about improving policies and procedures that can miss, overlook, or eliminate qualified candidates. Here are three strategies for improving your recruiting process:

1. Assess current practices and metrics. This means evaluating your present policies and practices and compiling baseline metrics of your workforce to set future goals and targets. Collecting information related to protected employment classes should be voluntary and preferably done in a manner that allows people to remain anonymous.
2. Broaden your horizons. People tend to hire applicants who are a lot like them. Although that’s understandable, it must change if you’re intent on working toward diversity, equity, and inclusion. It’s important to make an official commitment to diversity for your organization as a whole and to including marginalized people in your organization’s leadership. That commitment should include leadership buy-in and public support.
3. Expand your recruiting area. You can do this by redefining the ways your company finds job candidates. By expanding the scope of your search, you’ll broaden the pool of talent available for hire. Research suggests actions such as recruiting at historically black colleges and universities and at local and regional job fairs can be effective. You can collaborate with community-based partners like nonprofit organizations and national and local affiliation groups. If you can, hire recruiters based in major metropolitan areas and advertise in a variety of media, including magazines geared toward different segments of the population.

Hiring strategies

Next, focus on developing and implementing systematic and objective hiring processes. There are various ways to do that. You can:

• Review hiring protocols to ensure that qualification standards, job descriptions, interview questions, and applicant tests consider the specific job available.
• Eliminate degree requirements and other qualifications that aren’t necessary.
• Consider what types of skills may transfer or can be substituted for the qualifications you want.
• Require structured interviews be conducted by a diverse interview panel that have taken diversity training. Those interviews should follow a set list of questions and topics. This will help keep interviews equitable and focused on the necessary skills and requirements. This strategy also helps to keep unconscious bias out of interviews.
• Create minimum diversity goals for job applications. Seek to achieve a certain percentage of applicants belonging to a particular underrepresented group.
• Create minimum diversity standards for job search committee members. Note—this isn’t tokenism so long as everyone on the committee has an equal voice.
• Train job search committee members and others involved with hiring on bias and strategies for interviewing.
• Use joint interviews that encourage multiple managers to screen an applicant, which can reduce the impact of any one manager’s potential bias.
• Use anonymous résumés that omit an applicant’s name and address to reduce any potential preference for or bias against a particular individual.
• Discuss your diversity goals with any agencies you work with to find temporary, contract, or other employees.

Bottom line

DEI programs should first build and then support an organization-wide commitment to ensuring individuals from broadly diverse backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives are included and fully supported in the workplace. Use these strategies to create and improve your recruiting and hiring processes so that they can best support your DEI efforts.