Shawn Cole, President of Cowen Partners, says an organization can easily build a diverse team of qualified candidates by following these 6 steps.
A modern leader knows that having a team of diverse candidates helps the company to resolve issues and contribute innovative ideas on how best to improve the company. Diversity can be their race, religion, gender, experiences, socio-economic levels, etc.
In today’s world of business, workforce diversity is becoming the norm. The importance of a diversity recruiting strategy lies in its many benefits and its provisions for better performance, productivity, and innovations.
Some of those benefts include adding a wide range of skills and experience to your team, as well as enhanced awareness in terms of language and culture and large, more varied candidate pools.
Statistics show that diversity hiring is a way to further improve a company’s performance and contribute to the bottom line. They are;
The three key factors to consider when trying to improve your business are to 1) ask yourself what are your goals? 2) Have a discussion with your team on how to measure success, and 3) how best you can measure diversity recruiting metrics. Increase the number of diversity candidates by:
Cowen Partners says the easiest way to source more diverse candidates for recruitments is to go through your past job ads and make the necessary changes that will reach out to a broader range of candidates. It might be that the language you used in your past ads was directed towards a specific demographic level of experience.
Sourcing candidates should come from a variety of different places. It is not advisable to rely on one source, like a college, when seeking out new candidates as this may result in a lack of diverse ideas and innovations. Expanding your search to different places will result in a more diverse talent pool.
It is common for team members to have a network of people with similar backgrounds as their own. To boost your recruitment strategy and show that your company values different backgrounds and ideas, create a referral program involving diverse candidates. Encourage them to share company job ads and offer them the tools needed to promote the company for you.
Shawn Cole, President Cowen Partners says you need to act on the values you claim to have about diversity. Encouraging a safe, honest, and open dialogue with employees is a great way to make sure that everyone feels valued. Another part of increasing your diversity is in candidate screening and it includes:
A distinct way to ensure that you implement a bias-free resume screening process is to use artificial intelligence. To achieve this feat, you must reprogram your platform to flag and filter the specific skills and experience, and then allow the AI technology to analyze your candidate’s resumes. This way, you’ll be getting an impartial shortlist free from any bias.
Even if you don’t have an AI resource, Cowen Partners says you can creates an objective hiring process by stack ranking blinded resumes by skills that match the job description while removing personal bias about specific candidate’s background and experience from the equation.
The best way to monitor the progress in your diversity recruitment and inclusion strategy is to measure and report your progress. You can do this every month or quarter of the year along with your business result. As a manager or recruiter, the possible ways to see how well you’ve come in your diverse recruiting strategy is to identify the issues and try to overcome diversity barriers. Also devise more ways to modernize, maximize, and measure your hiring capabilities.
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