Inclusive hiring is absolutely vital because it determines the type of people that we bring into our organisation. And of course, we’re aiming for both demographic and cognitive diversity. Now, the ideal process is to map out the whole recruitment pathway and think about where bias occurs and how we can remove that.
To think about how we can improve our candidate experience and make sure that it’s inclusive and they feel involved within that process. And also to think about how we can improve efficiency in the whole process. Now that can be time consuming, and when we run that with organisations, it tends to be a day workshop.
So if you’re not looking for that right now, we’ve given you four quick wins to start to think about implementing immediately. The first of those is about where do we get our candidates from? So if we’re using the same platforms, so whether that’s the same recruiters, whether that’s referrals, we’re tending to get people that look very similar.
So what we need to think about is how do we broaden out that candidate pool? And there’s a couple of different ways to think about that. So the first is there’s lots of organisations that focus on specific demographic diversity. So for example, work 180 that focus on women. So we can look there. The second area is to understand where in our business we’re underrepresented in different groups and actively go out and bring those people into our pool through tools like LinkedIn, so proactive reach outs.
The second tip that we’ve given you is about the language that we use in our job ads. So there’s some terms, things like aggressive sales targets, for example, that we know tend to appeal less to women. So making sure that we do things like running our job ads through gender decoder tools, and there’s many of those available free online to make sure that we are not excluding people at that very first point of looking at our job ads.
The third tip then is a very simple one just to make sure within our job ads and job descriptions, we are including a term that says we are actively prioritising diversity. So it might say something like, diversity and inclusion is really important to us as an organisation. As part of that, we’re actively asking people from underrepresented groups within our organisation, such as women, LGBTQI plus people with disability to apply.
So actively calling out that we’re seeking diversity. It can be a really strong sign to candidates that this might be somewhere they want to apply to. And then the fourth tip is about thinking about how we remove areas of bias within cvs. So there’s so many opportunities for bias that exist within cvs.
We know that when people have names, for example, that don’t sound like Western names, they’re less likely to get callbacks. We know that when we see people in photos that look certain ways, they’re less likely to get callbacks. We know that if someone has affinity bias to a university that someone’s attended, they’re more likely to get a callback.
So if we are gonna use cvs, how do we remove information that might cause bias? So lots of things to think about about recruiting inclusively, but really important if we are truly caring about the diversity that we have within our team and organisations.
