How to champion D&I through Hiring Success

This article is part of our focus on sharing how TA leaders can build a more inclusive recruiting process. To become an active participant, check out the Diversity Hiring page!

Over the past few months, business leaders have been rethinking their corporate culture, and how they better incorporate diversity and inclusion (D&I). In that same spirit, talent acquisition professionals are tasked with espousing those values within their function.

Table of Contents

• Talent Attraction & Engagement
• Collaboration & Selection
• Management & Operating Model
• Final Thoughts

Leveraging the three pillars of Hiring Success, recruiting leaders can remedy major issues in D&I to foster a pluralistic and dynamic work environment. Within each pillar are opportunities to adopt D&I best practices. Whether it’s optimizing the accessibility of job postings, standardizing your interview questions, or using artificial intelligence to screen and counter bias—the three pillars present opportunities to truly attract, select, and hire a diverse and inclusive workforce. 

Talent Attraction & Engagement

Talent Attraction & Engagement emphasizes an organization’s ability to reach talent with a mix of recruiting strategies. With inbound and outbound tactics, companies are able to meet tailored hiring needs and goals. Talent acquisition leaders can foster greater accessibility and transparency in their sourcing strategy by focusing on key initiatives

• Promote your employer’s support for diversity in job ads: job postings give candidates insight into your employer brand and culture. Specifically mentioning and providing resources on how your company fosters an inclusive culture validates that your company’s goals and priorities
• Ensure accessibility for visual, auditory, and other disabilities whenever you post on career sites for a particular role. 
• Leverage niche job boards in order to build a more diverse candidate pipeline of talent who follow niche career posting sites. Here, it’s important to look at the supply chain of talent providers and ensure their values match those of your organization and are well understood
• Be transparent and specific about your D&I initiatives by discussing how it matters to your company and what you want to achieve. Simply mentioning D&I is not enough. Validating your stance with concrete examples and initiatives gives your candidates more confidence in your priorities

Through accessibility and transparency, Google has excelled at incorporating D&I best practices through the pillar of Talent Attraction & Engagement. Believing that a system for sourcing leads to everyone who brings something different, Laszlo Bock, former Google Head of HR, maintained the diversity of many departments. Their sourcing tactics multiplied the backgrounds, people, and talents that can fill their roles, leading to a more diverse candidate pool. 

Collaboration & Selection

Collaboration & Selection focuses on creating a simple and effective hiring workflow to help your team to hire the best. In this pillar, talent acquisition have the opportunity to remove the possibility of bias and discrimination when conducting screenings, interviews, and evaluations. 

For companies placing importance on D&I, prevention in Collaboration & Selection can be as important as promotion in Talent Attraction & Engagement. Preventative measures ensure that selection processes are as fair and balanced as possible. This means taking a systematic approach through scorecards, diverse hiring teams, and professional evaluation:

• When screening applicants be aware of your own unconscious bias as you create your candidate shortlists.
• Structure questions in interviews and provide scorecards to your team to standardize the process across your hiring teams.
• Diversify teams that represent your company including interviewers, managers, recruiters, and so forth to provide differing perspectives when evaluating candidates.
• Focus on skills rather than educational background or years of professional experience while evaluating candidates, to eliminate biases towards candidates from unconventional backgrounds.

These methods provide tangible, successful results. Marriott has found huge success through its diversity programs. They select candidates through structured interviews, diverse hiring teams, and with an emphasis on competencies rather than background. Seeing a 300% increase in the representation of women in top leadership positions, they will soon reach a goal to have 1,000 hotels run by minorities and women. 

Management & Operating Model

The third pillar of Hiring Success, Management & Operating Model, empowers recruiters with technology to remain flexible, scalable, and compliant. These advancements allow teams to power resume screenings with AI, communicate through more engaging mediums, and leverage data to track and report on D&I progress. 

This final pillar brings numerous benefits—not just cutting-edge technology—in democratizing recruiting. examples of such practices include: 

• Deploy A.I. to screen your resumes and applications to remove conscious and unconscious human bias. Keep in mind that the supplier/developers of this tool built the product without their own bias coded in (e.g., a team of white male developers may unknowingly build tech with bias)
• Use casual channels for communication with applicants who may find SMS and WhatsApp more accessible
• Analyze data on your D&I initiatives to track and report progress while pinpointing areas for improvement

With interventions like these, Pinterest succeeded in increasing hiring rates for women in engineering by 27%. Underrepresented talent fills 30% more senior roles at their company as well. Overall, they doubled minorities represented in their workforce to 9%. While there is more progress to be made, these advancements show the organization is headed in the right direction

Final Thoughts

Recruiting talent with diversity and inclusion in mind demands proven practices. Without a structured and systematic approach to hiring, simply stating the importance of diversity is not enough. It takes coordinated efforts across the hiring experience to promote D&I. 

Through Hiring Success, talent acquisition teams can validate their organization’s promise to foster a more inclusive and supportive workplace culture. Building a diversity driven talent acquisition team can transform your company’s towards business success:

• Attract excellent candidates (and retain them) when people go to your company for a supportive and inclusive environment.
• Boost performance throughout the company by outperforming your peers with happy, confident employees.
• Improve your organization’s ability to innovate from various backgrounds and experiences. 

Professional environments are a work in progress. When it comes to diversity and inclusion, you can make a difference by creating work settings that are more accessible, reflective of our world, and effective as a whole. Upgrade your D&I practices through Hiring Success, and advance your company.

This article is part of our focus on sharing how TA leaders can build a more inclusive recruiting process. To become an active participant, check out the Diversity Hiring page!