Best Practices to Diversify Your Hiring Process

Intel pledged more than $300 million to start their Diversity in Technology initiative in 2015, with the goal of recruiting more women and under-represented minorities in their workforce. Companies like Intel recognize when you employ a more diverse workforce, the organization benefits from different perspectives, background and experience. In addition to providing equal opportunities, diverse teams help the company respond to a wider range of customer needs.

The benefits don’t stop there.

Diverse workplace teams helps boost employee engagement, performance and profitability. Conventional hiring processes often ignore – or accidentally discriminate against – suitable job seekers in terms of gender, age, sexual orientation or ethnicity. The good news is that by eliminating biases in the sourcing, screening and shortlisting processes, you can gain access to talented candidates from diverse backgrounds.

The following three-step method helps you attract quality candidates while achieving your diversity hiring goals at the same time.

1. Re-Wording Job Postings for Candidate Sourcing

Re-word your job posting to eliminate any words that seem even subconsciously prejudiced. For example, words like “dominate” and “aggressive” may be perceived to be masculine and may discourage female candidates from applying.

Similarly, showcasing current workplace diversity and offering flexible work-from-home options helps attract candidates. Including referrals from minority candidates in your job posting also helps add credibility in terms of diversity.

2. Change the Pre-Hire Assessment Criteria for Screening Candidates

Traditional criteria such as background, previous experience and personal attributes often discourage diversity. Blind hiring involves concealing personal information that may – consciously or unconsciously – bias the recruiter for or against the candidate. It’s best to screen candidates purely on the basis of merit.

3. Use Automated Shortlisting to Increase Diversity Hiring

Manual shortlisting often leads to unintentional biases.  Automated shortlisting processes use a consistent and objective approach based on skills and experience that helps reduce human bias in the shortlisting process.

A Diverse Hiring Process Provides a Sustainable Edge Over the Competition

Diversity hiring is a value-based selection process with special care taken to exclude unconscious biases with regard to gender, age, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation and cultural background. Evaluating and re-assessing data before and after a diverse hiring initiative can help identify flaws in the process. More often times than not, prioritizing critical skills, reworking the screening process and disregarding unnecessary hiring criteria can help you eliminate factors that are unrelated to job suitability. Teams that are more diverse are more proficient at navigating challenges and fostering growth.

Empower your workforce by recruiting from our network of diverse candidates. Contact nTech Workforce today for flexible and customized IT staffing solutions for your requirements and needs.