With the right recruitment strategies, companies can attract a diverse candidate pool and create a ... [+]
An advocacy nonprofit had sporadic wins, but an overall lack of diversity in their candidate pool. Sometimes the bottleneck is not attracting diverse candidates at the application stage.
An education organization prioritized diversity in hiring but found themselves in constant competition with other employers for the same shortlist of candidates. Sometimes you can find candidates, but heavy competition means you don’t convert as many offers to acceptances.
A media company hired dozens of college interns, specifically attracting underrepresented groups, but few hires converted into full-time jobs. Sometimes you get the hires, but they don’t stay.
Within a year of adding one or more of the below five recruitment strategies, all three firms were able to close the gaps in their hiring process:
1 — Proactively expand the diversity of your referral sources
Even if you are a Fortune 500 company with a robust applicant tracking system (as the media company was), or a brand-name nonprofit (as the advocacy firm was) a large portion of your hires will come from word-of-mouth. If your staff is homogenous to begin with, then relying on referrals will exacerbate the situation. Or even if you have decent diversity in your staff, you may not be getting referrals from everyone.
When revamping a recruiting process, one of the first tasks should be meeting one-to-one with each senior leader and as many experienced staff as possible to proactively generate referrals. People forget how many people they actually know – you need a meeting to ask about classmates, colleagues, LinkedIn and other social connections.
At the education organization, the candidate referral bonus was more than doubled, and an announcement was made at the company all-hands meeting to detail upcoming openings and the push for diversity. People are busy, and while they might know candidates and be happy to refer people, actually thinking of people and forwarding names to the recruiting team won’t be top of mind.
2 — Focus job descriptions on specific requirements over general qualifications
Too often, a job description will unnecessarily require a qualification, such as a CPA, when what the role really needs is the experience a typical CPA would have, such as financial audits. Or it might be that the hiring managers sees CPAs as having the client experience and problem-solving skills needed, but you don’t actually need to be a CPA to have interacted with clients and solved problems. The problem with overly restrictive job descriptions is that it can filter out perfectly qualified candidates too early in the process (e.g., a longtime finance person who never got the CPA specifically).
The advocacy nonprofit reused a lot of job descriptions from role to role, rather than reconfirming what they really needed, as new roles would arise. Once they looked at each opening with fresh eyes, they realized that some requirements were proxies for skills or expertise that could actually be cultivated in different ways. For example, one development role required fundraising-like experience but more specifically required interacting with demanding clients, conducting in-depth research and using specialized databases. Once the activities were teased out, it opened up the role to a wider range of candidates and enabled the team to add several diverse hires to just the fundraising team in less than a year.
3 — Decide on measurable evaluation criteria – in advance
Continuing the above example, the nonprofit also set their evaluation criteria in advance of screening candidates to ensure less reliance on “fit” or gut instinct (which can allow unconscious bias to creep in). They specified the target amount of client experience, examples of “demanding” client interactions, how much research would be considered “in-depth” and what types of databases would be considered similar enough to the ones currently used.
Interviewers all along the hiring process, from first round to late stages, were informed about the hiring requirements so the screening process was a consistent experience for the candidates. Being upfront about evaluation criteria has the added bonus of streamlining the feedback discussion. With a shared set of evaluation criteria, all interviewers have a starting point for discussing the various candidates and a structure for scoring and comparing them.
4 — Incorporate skills-based screening to make the process more objective
There are multiple ways to test for skills during the interview process. Employers can ask for work samples. While these won’t be customized to the employer, the benefit is that it’s less work for the candidate in that there is no new work to do. Alternatively, candidates can be assigned a question to research or a topic to provide feedback on. Skills-based screening is another way to rely less on fit and subjective metrics.
It can also help employers widen the scope of opportunities to which a candidate can be matched. The media company which didn’t have consistency converting interns to full-time hires struggled because the roles available over the summer weren’t often available as full-time options, meaning that interns might do well in one area that wasn’t directly comparable to future openings. With skills-based screening, a candidate whose finance experience to date was simple bookkeeping had an opportunity to demonstrate what he could do with a more analytical task. His strong performance was enough to convince the hiring manager of a different group to take a chance on him – one of several examples of interns finding new matches for their skills.
5 — Be prepared to sell
In addition to selling hiring managers on candidates with slightly different backgrounds, prospective employers looking to land diverse hires have to sell to the candidates. Giving them a summer internship isn’t enough – the experience you give makes these candidates more attractive to other employers, increasing your competition. The media company added learning and development programs throughout the summer, as well as social events to build community and genuine relationships with the candidates. The relationship-building paid off even with interns who elected not to join because they referred their friends (diversifying the source of referrals, as per point one).
Ideally the push for diverse hiring is a shared effort among senior leadership, the hiring department and HR
None of these changes occurred overnight, though positive momentum was evident within weeks of implementing these strategies. Improvements weren’t a straight trajectory upward. Some searches were niche roles with smaller overall pools and an even smaller subset of diverse candidates. Some hiring teams were less open to changing how they sourced and/or screened candidates. The best results were seen where there was a supportive senior leader backing the effort and a strong partnership between the hiring team and HR/ recruiting.
