How Can You Attract Diverse Candidates?
Having a diverse workforce is a no brainer. It’s common knowledge that diverse teams drive innovation, creativity, are better at finding solutions to problems, and ultimately improve your company’s bottom line.
Having people in your teams from a range of background and experiences creates a melting pot of ideas giving you a competitive advantage and setting you apart from the competition.
In fact, companies with diverse teams:
- Have 19% higher revenue
- Make better decisions 87% of the time
- Are 7x more likely to lead innovation in their space
Over 80% of millennial candidates consider an organisation’s stance on diversity before they apply, so if your stance is wrong, or it’s not communicated effectively, you could be missing out on attracting top talent into your company.
So where do you start when it comes to attracting diverse candidates to come and work for you?
Before candidates even get to the application stage, before they’ve even read a job advert, there are a number of things to consider:
Define what diversity means to your business.
Then set your goals and expectations. Without these goals, any future hiring strategies will lack focus.
A great place to start is by looking internally at your own teams and understanding their make up through questionnaires and surveys. Having a true understanding of how your business is made up will give you a baseline to start from when it comes to setting your goals.
Equally, involving all relevant parties and communicating with them at every stage of your goal setting is important. All key stakeholders need to be on the same page and be accountable if changes to how and why you’re building a more diverse workforce are to be achieved.
Showcase diversity across all touchpoints
What does the language you use on your website or social say to potential candidates? Do the images you use truly reflect who you are as a business?
Taking a real look at your presence both online and offline is hugely important as these are often the first interactions potential candidates will have with your business.
When it comes to the language you’re using, in particular in your ‘about us’ or ‘work for us’ sections, consider whether it’s more biased towards a particular demographic. Likewise, with the imagery on these sections, showcasing a broad mix of your employees and their stories will give off an inclusive feel to candidates.
Championing your employees from all backgrounds and experiences, and including their testimonials is a great way to attract diverse candidates. If you’re positioned as a company that’s inclusive, culturally diverse and ultimately a great place to work, you’ll be an attractive proposition to candidates.
Review your workplace policies
Often overlooked, your workplace policies play an important part in whether top talent applies to your vacancies.
The world of work is changing rapidly. Companies are being creative with their workplace policies, almost revolutionising them, to meet the different needs of a diverse workforce.
Taking a look at how you set your policies such as holiday allowance, flexibility, maternity and paternity leave is vital and it’s also a good way to involve the wider team and seek their feedback.
If you’ve implemented changes to certain policies, make sure to communicate them clearly across the necessary touchpoints both internally and externally. Not only will this go a long way to attracting candidates, but it should help to improve employee retention and performance.
Create content that’s relevant to all audiences
Be deliberate with the blog content you post and feature diversity-focused topics and topics that represent a diverse team. Similarly, using email and social campaigns to broaden that message and reinforce your culture and identity as a company is a great step to take.
Using as many channels as possible to showcase your company as one that promotes diversity and inclusivity and communicating this effectively will get your company in front of more candidates from diverse backgrounds.
Utilise employee referrals
Your teams will have large, diverse networks built up over time that is a great resource to tap into. Not only are employee referrals 55% faster to hire, but they can save you money on hiring platforms and recruitment fees too.
Offering referrals schemes to reward successful referrals are a great way to create buy-in from your team but also gives them the incentive to reach out to top-quality candidates in their network.
What’s next?
While you don’t need to follow all 5 steps to attract a diverse mix of candidates, it’s certainly a good idea to implement a few of them.
It’s important also to consider how these changes affect your existing workforce. Through considering the above, and making changes, your commitment to creating a diverse workforce will be clear to all employees creating a positive working environment and culture; one which your team can be proud of.
If you want to speak to the Digital Republic Talent team about your Diversity and Inclusion strategy, then we are on hand to help. Drop us a call on +44 203 637 3331 or email [email protected].
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