Implementing Diversity and Inclusion strategy is one of the top challenge for organisations today. In this competitive world where organisations are thriving for talent, it is imperative to have commitment to diversity and inclusion to set your organisation apart from others. It starts with drafting a well-planned and intensive strategy to find diverse talent. Leadership team and managers agree that a diverse team always helps in getting better results, are more innovating, creative and productive. Having varied opinions and ideas from people coming from different background can contribute to drive innovation within the organisation. 

Organisations across world are now focusing on developing and improving diversity as its benefits goes beyond business results and performance excellence. Building teams from people coming from different demographics i.e. background, race, gender, religion or sexual orientation is a step towards attaining perfect equality in the workplace. Companies with diverse management teams have higher revenue, more number of innovative leaders and even helps in improving bottom line in the organisation. Increasing diversity in the workforce starts with increasing the pool of candidates applying for any job. 

Diversity recruiting incorporates a process that is free from biases as it gives equal opportunity to all applicants irrespective of their background. Still hiring decisions will be based on competency and skill-set of the candidate, as the main purpose is to select best possible candidate from larger and more varied pool. Best way to start implementing D&I strategy is to boost your employer brand. Brand yourself as an organisation that values people and ideas from everyone and encourage employees to talk about valuing diversity in the culture. One of the best way to have diversified candidates apply for the opportunities is to focus job postings as per the need, find ways to be more inclusive in your language to attract candidates with different backgrounds. While sourcing candidates, don’t rely only on same sources over and over again rather divert focus on sourcing through new channels. There are different websites and groups having pool of minority, underrepresented and women candidates, which can be a great source to meet and connect with potential pool.

There are different techniques used by diversified recruiters to remove biasness while screening candidates like “black out” and “blind interviews” wherein personal information of the candidate is hidden from the recruiter and candidates are screened based on text-based questions and are asked to avoid sharing any personal information. Blind interviews can be helpful during initial screening only but final decision of hiring will be hardest part of the diversity recruiting. After knowing about each candidate, your own bias would affect the decision for sure. We can’t fully run away from personal biases but we can work on at least reducing them. To combat this, having multiple panels from diversified background meet all shortlisted candidates to remove biasness from the interview process and will result in more even playing field when it comes to choosing one to hire. Many organisations have started internal diversity programs that offer internship and entry positions to candidates from specific backgrounds. To accomplish this, reach out to institutes and community groups to determine opportunities to make connections with students.

It is incredibly important for organisations to measure success of D&I initiatives to evaluate impact of implementing a diversity recruiting strategy. Data may be difficult to assess but when you gauge results through surveys or questioning people on their experience post joining, you just need to find out best ways to process the data and utilise it for further improvement. Make all recruiters as owner for diversity recruiting and focus on creating passive diverse candidates pipeline. Some of the metrics that can be used to track success of these initiatives can be percentage of diverse candidates at each recruiting stage, percentage of minorities at different levels in the organisation, diverse candidate’s satisfaction rate, retention rate among minority employees and growth opportunities for these groups within the organisation. 

Our purpose is to make sure candidate should be able to say, “This is a place where I can thrive” during entire process starting from going through the job description until completion of the hiring process. It doesn’t end here, post joining also these employees should not feel left out from rest of the crowd in the organisation. There should be equal opportunity for inclusion, growth and people have a sense of belonging. Diverse employees will talk to other diverse individuals. Your employees share what it is like to work for your company. Because of this, your diverse candidates’ perception of your company spreads throughout their communities. Having an approach focusing on D&I initiatives during complete talent life cycle will surely result in prominent growth for the organisation.