Diversity Hiring – Meaning, Importance and Measures

What is Diversity Hiring?

Diversity Hiring is defined as the practice of recruiting candidates from a wide range of backgrounds, ensuring representation of different races, genders, religions, and other demographic groups. It aims to create an inclusive workforce that reflects society’s diversity, promotes equal opportunity, and leverages varied perspectives for organisational growth and innovation.

Why is a Diverse Workforce Important within an Organisation?

1. Profitability: Enterprises with greater diversity in the workplace tend to have higher earnings. As per a study by Boston Consulting Group (BCG), firms with more diverse management teams report 19% higher revenue.

2. Innovation: Workplaces with more diversity are often more innovative. Research conducted by Josh Bersin indicates that diverse companies are 1.7 times more likely to lead innovation within their market.

3. Wisdom: Enterprises with a diverse workforce make superior decisions. A white paper from the online decision-making platform Cloverpop revealed that diverse teams outperformed individual decision-makers up to 87% of the time when making a business decision.

4. Attraction: A diverse workforce leads to a higher job acceptance rate. As per Glassdoor, 67% of job seekers consider a diverse workforce important when evaluating job offers.

5. Performance: McKinsey’s reports show that companies with racial and ethnic diversity outperform industry standards by 35%.

How to Measure your Diversity Hiring Goals?

1. Identify the Make-Up of Your Organisation: The first step in measuring diversity hiring goals is to understand the current state of diversity within your workforce. This involves analysing the demographic composition of your employees, including their gender, race, age, and other relevant factors. It is important to have a clear picture of where you stand before you can set goals for improvement.

2. Draft Targets: After setting your diversity goals, the next step is to draft targets. These targets should be specific and measurable, and they should be designed to address the specific areas where your organisation needs to improve its diversity and inclusion efforts.

3. Implement Bias-Free Recruiting Practices: Implementing bias-free recruiting practices is crucial for achieving your diversity hiring goals. This involves ensuring that your hiring process is fair and consistent and that it does not unfairly disadvantage any particular group. This might involve implementing unconscious bias training for your hiring managers or using technology to remove bias from your recruitment process.

4. Provide a Discrimination-Free Workplace: Providing a discrimination-free workplace is crucial for maintaining diversity. This involves creating a workplace culture that values diversity and inclusion and does not tolerate discrimination or harassment. This might involve implementing policies and procedures to prevent and address discrimination and harassment and providing diversity and inclusion training for all employees.

5. Monitor, Evaluate, and Optimise Your Efforts: Finally, it is important to constantly monitor, evaluate, and optimise your diversity hiring efforts. This involves regularly reviewing your diversity metrics to assess your progress and making necessary adjustments to your strategies and tactics as needed. This will help ensure that your diversity hiring efforts are effective and that they are contributing to the achievement of your overall diversity goals.

Common Mistakes while Hiring Diverse Candidates

1. Biasness in Job Advertisements and Descriptions: Unconscious bias can easily infiltrate job posts, descriptions, and offers, significantly affecting an organisation’s image regarding diversity. This can include gender-specific language, ageism, and a lack of consideration for people with different abilities. It is crucial to review your job listings and recruitment communications for these biases.

2. Understand the Required Requirements: Diversity is not a straightforward policy implementation but an ongoing process to promote equity, inclusion, and belonging within your organisation. A recruitment policy aimed at attracting and hiring diverse candidates will fail if the new hires do not feel safe and welcomed in the workplace.

3. Setting Goals Based on Data, Not Guesswork: Like all hiring processes, diversity hiring benefits from the use of available data and the setting of realistic goals for accountability. Instead of relying on guesswork and hoping for results, recruitment teams should utilise employee and candidate data to devise a hiring strategy that aligns with their overall objectives and allows for measurable outcomes. For instance, a company might aim to reflect the diversity of the local population in their workforce using population data or use compensation data tools like LaborIQ to ensure that their offers are competitive and equitable.

Useful Diversity Hiring Ideas

1. Unconscious Bias Training: Unconscious biases can subtly influence hiring decisions, often without our realizing it. Providing training to your hiring team can help them recognise and overcome these biases. This ensures a fair and unbiased selection process, promoting diversity in your workforce.

2. Diverse Job Boards: By posting job openings on diverse job boards and forums, you can attract a wide range of candidates. These platforms cater to different communities and demographics, helping to ensure a diverse applicant pool and increasing the chances of finding the best talent.

3. Inclusive Job Descriptions: Job descriptions should be inclusive and welcoming to all. Avoid using gendered language and unnecessary requirements that could deter certain groups from applying. This ensures that everyone, regardless of their background, feels encouraged to apply.

4. Diversity and Inclusion Policies: Implementing clear diversity and inclusion policies helps foster an inclusive culture within your organisation. Communicate these policies to all employees to ensure everyone understands and respects them. This helps create a safe and welcoming environment for all.

5. Mentorship Programmes: Mentorship programs can support the growth and development of diverse employees. By pairing less experienced employees with seasoned professionals, these programs can help retain diverse talent, promote them to leadership roles, and ensure their voices are heard.

6. Employee Resource Groups (ERGs): ERGs provide a platform for employees from diverse backgrounds to support each other and voice their concerns. Encouraging the formation of such groups within your organisation can foster a sense of belonging and community.

7. Diversity Hiring Metrics: Tracking diversity hiring metrics is crucial for assessing the effectiveness of your diversity hiring efforts. Use these metrics to identify areas for improvement, make necessary adjustments, and ensure your efforts are yielding the desired results.

8. Partner with Diversity Organisations: Partnering with organisations that promote diversity can provide valuable resources and insights. These partnerships can help improve your diversity hiring practices, making your organisation more attractive to diverse talent. 

How to Improve Diversity when Hiring?

1. Evaluating Your Job Hiring Process: Evaluate the diversity of your existing recruitment process and pinpoint any potential obstacles or inconsistencies. Is it an issue at the beginning of the process? Or is it more of a problem with the pipeline leaking? You can’t get a clear understanding of how to make progress until you examine your diversity hiring data. Consider the following questions,

• What are the strong points of my diversity hiring?
• What are the difficulties in my diversity hiring?

2. Promoting Jobs Through Diverse Channels: Consider promoting your job openings on the platforms mentioned in the third point and similar ones. Think about attending networking events and job fairs organised by groups that cater to minority communities. If your organisation participates in campus recruitment, consider extending your reach to community colleges, trade schools, HBCUs, and so on.

3. Leveraging Diverse Job Boards: Job boards continue to be a valuable resource for engaging potential candidates. It is crucial to ensure that these job boards are as diverse as possible.

4. Initiating Blind Job Interviews: Implementing a blind interview can be challenging. Even phone interviews can inadvertently reveal aspects of a candidate’s race, age, and gender. Eventually, you will need to have a face-to-face meeting with your candidate. However, blind interviews can be an effective strategy to ensure that the selection of candidates is free from bias.

5. Take help from AI: Most HR managers agree that the most challenging aspect of recruitment is pinpointing the right candidates from a large pool of applicants. In recent years, the use of AI has been introduced to assist in recruitment by reducing, and in some instances, eliminating, time-consuming tasks such as manually screening resumes.

Are there any Specific Laws about Diversity in the Workplace?

Workplace diversity laws were enacted to protect employees from unfair treatment by organisations and colleagues. These laws have been periodically updated to accommodate changes in culture and technology related to race, gender, religion, equal pay, and non-discrimination. There are four important laws, which are,

1. The Equality Act, of 2006: The Equality Act, of 2006 established a regulatory body known as the Commission for Equality and Human Rights. This body’s public duty is to foster and maintain a society that respects individual human rights and encourages people to reach their potential without being hindered by bias.

2. The Equality Act, of 2010: The Equality Act, of 2010 consolidated over 116 pieces of legislation into a single law, including the Equality Pay Act, of 1970 and the Sex Discrimination Act, of 1975. Chapter 1 of this Equal Pay Act specifically refers to organisations. Under this act, any organisation can’t discriminate against any employee. For example, a company must make reasonable adjustments when hiring a person with a disability. The act also stipulates that companies cannot treat an employee (or job applicant) more favourably or less favourably than another employee due to a protected characteristic.

3. The Civil Rights Act (Title VII): Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is another law that promotes workplace diversity. This act makes it illegal to discriminate against any individual based on their race, religion, sex, national origin, or sexual orientation. In addition, the Civil Rights Act prohibits sexual harassment, defined as any unwanted sexual advance or favour and any verbal or physical harassment of a sexual nature. This includes sexual harassment where submission to or rejection of this behaviour directly or indirectly affects a person’s employment, unreasonably interferes with a person’s work performance, or creates an intimidating, hostile, or offensive work environment.

4. Workplace Safety Laws: The Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) ensures that employees in all organisations work in safe conditions. Another regulation that helps protect your workforce’s safety is the workers’ compensation law. These laws outline the management of disability programs that assist federal employees who are injured at work or become disabled while performing their duties.

Conclusion

In conclusion, diversity in hiring is a crucial aspect of modern recruitment practices. It not only enriches the workplace with a variety of perspectives and ideas but also fosters an environment of inclusivity and respect. However, it is not without its challenges. From ensuring unbiased job descriptions to translating DEI policies into action, organisations must be proactive and committed to their diversity hiring strategies. Moreover, they must adhere to various laws and regulations designed to protect diversity in the workplace. Ultimately, successful diversity hiring requires a deep understanding of its complexities, a commitment to continuous improvement, and a genuine desire to create a workplace that values and respects all individuals.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

1. Why is Diversity Hiring important?

Diversity in the workplace fosters creativity, innovation, and various perspectives, leading to a more inclusive and productive environment.

2. What are the common challenges in Diversity Hiring?

Challenges may include unconscious biases, a lack of diverse candidate pipelines, and the need for an inclusive company culture.

3. How can companies promote Diversity in their hiring processes?

Companies can use blind recruitment, offer diversity training, actively source candidates from diverse backgrounds, and create an inclusive hiring culture.

4. What is the difference between Diversity and Inclusion in hiring?

Diversity focuses on the variety of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives, while inclusion involves creating an environment where all employees feel valued and included.

5. How can companies address resistance to Diversity Hiring?

Providing education on the benefits of diversity, fostering open communication, and leading by example can help overcome resistance.