Complete Inclusion in Recruitment
Many leaders today know about the benefits of having inclusive policies and a diverse employee base. Having employees who feel valued and able to be their authentic selves leads to a lower turnover rate, higher employee engagement, productivity, innovation….the list goes on! It also tackles issues like design bias by introducing fresh perspectives (see our article on that here).
Yet, it isn’t as simple as wanting diverse talent – organisations need to attract them and retain them. I all too often hear the deflection of, “Well, we have inclusive recruitment practices, it’s just that the diverse talent isn’t actually there”.
Really?
Most often these leaders have conflated attraction with selection. Attraction is all about finding the applicants for a position, whilst selection is then sifting through the applications to find the potential employees. They are distinctly separate parts of the hiring process, but the leaders have only focussed on making the selection process inclusive and that’s why the diverse talent isn’t there.
Common inclusive selection processes include blind CVs, diverse hiring panels and interviewers, and making accommodations for applicants. But, if the attraction part of the recruitment process is neglected then the applicant pool will still be as homogenous as before and lack the crucial diversity.
How can the whole recruitment process be made inclusive?
The most important quality in inclusive recruitment is objectivity. The first thing that should be done is a job competency analysis, which simply refers to analysing which qualities are essential for the job and deciding the most effective ways of measuring them. By limiting the contents of a job advert to the most fundamental qualities, organisations open up the recruitment process to many more individuals than a long, exhaustive, list of qualities would.
The job advert should also be brief, easy to read, and use inclusive language. This is done by avoiding mentioning things like age and by using neutral pronouns, no “he will” or “she would”, just “the successful applicant will” or simply “they will”.
Essentially, you should assume nothing about who the successful applicant will be or what they’ll be like. Just focus on those objective qualities you need.
What if I do all that and still can’t find the diverse talent?
If your organisation is doing all of those attraction practices and the diverse talent is still not showing up, you may be looking in the wrong places. Where do you typically publish the job advert? Are there groups of people who would be unlikely to see it there? Think broadly about different socio-economic groups, race and ethnic groups, genders etc. If you fish in the same pond you’ve always fished in you can’t expect a new catch. Instead, broaden those nets and you’ll find an ocean of talent.
If your organisation is in an established industry and you’re struggling to find diverse talent pools, many industries have dedicated groups and charities that exist to promote diversity in the industry. By contacting them, they may provide, or signpost you to, these diverse talent pools. There are also organisations like Ruebik, which seek out diverse talent and support with the onboarding process.
What’s next?
If you’ve made your attraction process more inclusive, you’ll likely be seeing those diverse candidates in your applicant pool. However, there are 2 more critical steps:
1. Ensure that your recruitment decision makers are self-aware and conscious of the common pitfalls and biases that can play out when bringing in talent. For example, the affinity bias which could lead them to feel more positive towards someone who sees the world as they do and shares a similar background.
2. Ensure the organisational culture is ready to welcome and embrace the diverse talent. This is a much more time-consuming and lengthy piece of work to shift the mindset and upskill leaders and all employees on how to behave in an inclusive way.
How can Avenir help?
You may find all these new considerations daunting and wonder how you’re meant to de-bias your recruitment process and shift the organisational culture to be a place that welcomes and supports diversity. At Avenir, we have a number of programmes designed to help you analyse your organisation to benchmark how inclusive it is and work with your leaders and employees to think and act with an inclusion mindset. Using our expertise in psychology, we have also have a Debiasing Recruitment workshop, which supports anyone responsible for recruitment in your organisation to hire inclusively. You can get more information on our services here.