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Great! You’ve posted a job on a job board that focuses on underrepresented minority candidates? Now what?
You know that the key to a great hire is finding strong candidates upfront and finding strong candidates happens when recruiters and hiring managers create a collaborative relationship.
If you’re a hiring manager, how well have you briefed your internal and external recruitment team on your expectations?
If you’re a recruiter, how is your relationship with the hiring manager who wants this role filled? Do you communicate expectations well? Do you have the data you need to advise the hiring manager?
Working together to set crystal clear expectations will get you the best results when attempting to attract and recruit diverse candidates.
Why posting on a diversity job board isn’t enough
Failing to attract employees from diverse backgrounds leads the organization to compete for talent in a candidate pool that is more narrow than necessary.
Mitigating unconscious bias can increase success in the war for talent and reduce undesirable outcomes. Specifically, in recruiting and hiring, unconscious bias results in differences in the way we attract, hire, develop, and retain people from underrepresented groups. The differences we point to are usually subtle and result in significant barriers to cultivating a diverse, inclusive organization.
Unconscious bias is only “unconscious” until we make a conscious decision to address it.
Before candidates begin applying and you begin navigating through your hiring process, take the time to think about how you plan to short circuit the part of your brain that leads with bias.
Have you considered your actions and how they affect the hiring process? Have you discussed this with the hiring manager?
Diversity recruiting, when done well, is simply good recruiting.
If the end goal of recruiting is to hire and the final say on hiring comes from the hiring manager, addressing bias blindspots in the recruiting process is the job of both the recruiter and the hiring manager.
Here are the 5 key questions to answer:
- Have you discussed the interview process for this role? Who will conduct it?
- Who else might be involved?
- Do you have a standard process that is used with every candidate?
- Have you discussed what a successful hire will look like?
- What does a ‘successful candidate’ really mean in terms of their skills, experience, background and education?
When you are working to increase diversity in your organization, it is extremely important to set expectations at the beginning of the process and obtain agreement from the hiring manager.
- Yes, I agree we should make diversity a priority.
- Yes, I’m open to hiring someone who didn’t attend ___ university.
- Yes, I agree that we’ll have at least 2 diverse hires in our slate of candidates, not just 1.
Harvard Business Review has cited studies demonstrating that if there is only one woman in your candidate pool, there is statistically no chance she will be hired. However, when there are at least two female candidates in the final candidate pool, the odds of hiring a female candidate are 79X greater.
Trying to impact these decisions after the process has begun and candidates have been presented, will make your job unnecessarily difficult and almost impossible.
So now that you’ve posted the job, before you begin presenting candidates, go back to the hiring manager and gain agreement upfront on requirements. Do that and you’ll find that the candidate review process will result in a smoother process and increased diversity.
Looking for more ways to hire diverse candidates? See what other hiring teams are struggling and seeing success in Breezy’s State of Diversity Hiring Report 2022.
Author Bio
Leading at the intersection of diversity, inclusion, and workplace culture, Stacey focuses on recruitment and career development initiatives. She is CEO of Rework Work, where she delivers keynote speeches, consults with organizations, and develops educational content that engages professionals globally, both in-person and in a virtual environment. She focuses on reworking how companies work; including how they inclusively recruit, hire and engage employees, effectively creating inclusion and belonging for all.
