Achieving true diversity within your business and its workforce is about more than just checking a box that says you’ve succeeded in hiring people from different backgrounds. Recruitment for diversity is a great and necessary start, but it’s not a panacea.
Hiring for Diversity
To optimize diversity in your recruitment tactics:
- Make changes as needed not only to where you source talent, but also how you market your business to diverse candidates. This may include expanding your reach to more diverse schools and colleges, as well as ensuring that diverse team members are featured in your marketing materials and on interview panels.
- Further expand your reach by offering generous relocation packages and commuter benefits. This will help make your company more accessible to individuals from all different walks of life.
- Implement an employee referral program. By encouraging employees to tap into their own networks, a referral system can result in a more diverse workforce. It also empowers you to make your hiring decisions more democratic by involving current employees in the process.
- Start with a younger target audience. Begin filling your talent pipeline as early as the high school level, when students first begin to make life plans. As you do so, build relationships for now and for the future with faculty members and administrators.
Beyond Recruitment
Here are some steps to consider as you set realistic, attainable diversity goals company-wide:
- Take stock of your company’s current mindset. Do you have teams composed exclusively of a specific gender or age group? Are certain roles filled primarily by people from the same ethnic background? Take proactive steps to assist those who have been held back due to stereotypes or unconscious biases.
- Create an inclusive culture. This means having a work environment where every employee not only feels included, but like they truly belong. From the top down, go beyond respecting differing opinions; embrace and encourage them. Weave this commitment into policies and programs, as well as informal customs and everyday behaviors. As is true in all ways that count, lead by example.
- Offer flexible and remote work options. Due to long-entrenched societal norms, certain demographics – for example, single parents, who are disproportionately women – are at a disadvantage when applying for jobs with rigid schedules. No one should have to choose between childcare – or elder care or other vital personal demands – and employment.
- Make diversity part of your MO. Give it more than just lip service with tangible steps such as making your workspace more wheelchair-friendly and holding diversity education sessions.
The Accurate Staffing Consultants team is committed to partnering with its clients to build the best, most successful, and most diverse workforces possible. Specializing in areas including light industrial, office, healthcare, and managed services and WBENC certified, we can help you meet all your diversity plans, goals, and vision. Contact us today to learn more.