Senior Delivery Consultant, Finance
Hannah Smith
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There is a growing conversation around Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) in the workplace, with more and more companies investing significant time into improving and evolving their diversity agendas. Organisations will benefit from the varying perspectives of a diverse workforce. A culture that inspires people to think differently and openly share their views is crucial for innovation, proficiency, and future success.
The first step towards creating an inclusive work environment is implementing inclusive hiring practices across the recruitment lifecycle. An effective inclusive hiring process involves more than considering a person’s gender or race. It is broad and all-encompassing, considering things like age, class, ethnicity, disabilities, upbringing, sexual orientation, experiences, religion, and more.
Inclusive recruitment can help build robust teams, increase employee happiness, and help you beat out competitors. Here are a few of the best practices for adopting inclusive recruitment processes:
Employee Education
Training is key to building an inclusive organisation. Ongoing education can help staff recognise and understand the effect of their unconscious biases. Many known biases can impact the hiring process, including but not limited to confirmation bias, affinity bias, affect heuristics, conformity bias, and halo effect.
With this knowledge, companies should create a programme that helps team members eliminate their unconscious biases. Learning and development programmes can ensure long-lasting progress for hiring managers and recruitment teams and encourage staff to view the hiring process through a truly inclusive lens.
Job Descriptions
Job descriptions should be written with gender-neutral and nondiscriminatory language. If you fail to consider diversity even at the earliest stages of the recruitment process, you may be missing out on a wider candidate pool. Steering clear of exclusive language in job descriptions will make it so that any individual who is qualified for the role will feel empowered to apply.
Employer Branding
Authenticity and transparency will guide your organisation towards achieving diversity goals and help develop and maintain your brand as an inclusive employer. Challenge your organisation to publish its diversity statement, relevant statistics, and policies. Many candidates search for this information before applying for a role or joining a company, making employer reputation a strategic imperative.
Measure and monitor diversity
By leveraging the right tools and solutions, businesses can minimise known hiring biases. We’ve all heard the old cliché ‘what gets measured, gets done.’ Concrete data allows us to measure both our achievements and our shortcomings. Through tracking different statistics, organisations will better understand which approaches to inclusivity are working and which are not.
This data can help leaders make informed decisions on where to focus time and resources in their D&I efforts. Employers can use monitoring to check how well policies are working, analyse the effects of policies and procedures on different groups, and investigate the underlying causes for any inequalities. Setting explicit diversity targets will help propel your agenda forward.
Actionable steps
Every organisation can adapt these actionable steps to attract a more diverse candidate pool, which paves the way for building more diverse shortlists and ultimately hiring more diverse candidates. The key is to be proactive; to enact any real change, you need to audit your current processes and evolve them to better hire for the future.
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