What is one tip for developing inclusive hiring practices?

Inclusive hiring practices need to start from the top. The executives and leaders in the organization must have a diverse network to value diversity of people and thought. Look around you, what is the content you consume, if its all the same, it's time to diversify. It's never too late, it can be as simple as following people on LinkedIn that are different, look different and think different. Make new friends, talk to others. Be curious. Once that happens, it filters to HR and everything else falls into place. It has to start from the top to be authentic and sustainable.

Use pre-employment testing to help filter candidates that may be suitable for the position. This way, you are using a standardized process to isolate the ideal candidates in terms of skill and ability. It can help reduce preliminary bias and streamlines the process for the hiring manager. Aside from being inclusive, it’ll give you a better picture of their working style and thought process.

Creating a diverse workforce can be challenging, especially if your area of business is a narrow niche where only a small group of people works. One way to develop inclusive hiring practices is to create an open environment in the hiring process from the start. In other words, you should simplify the application process as much as possible so that more people with varying backgrounds can apply. It's also important to clearly define strict criteria about the role to elminate checking hundreds of applications.

One of the easiest ways to ensure an inclusive hiring process is to draft job descriptions that employ approachable, easily understood language. In other words, refrain from packing your job description full of industry or organization-specific jargon that could deter and filter out some of your strongest and most marginalized candidates. Additionally, consider the inclusion of a ‘Company Values’ section—an element of a job posting that can make all the difference in the diversity of your potential candidates. This can be as simple as pointing out that your organization values and encourages applications from folks of every skin tone, gender, origin, ability, and sexual orientation.

You need to get rid of any bias that’s affecting your hiring decision making before you can create a truly inclusive hiring practice. Bias could come from individuals or be worked into the organizational policies, and both types can be difficult to spot. Tracking your hiring data can be very helpful in pinpointing where in the process you’re losing diversity in applicants. If all of your applicants are fairly homogenous, it’s likely you need to refine your job descriptions or talent sources, while diverse applicants that yield a homogenous interview pool points to bias in the selection and screening process. These are just two examples of ways data can point out the areas you can make improvements to drive more inclusivity.

Obtain a More Diverse Client Base: Many businesses nowadays are striving to diversify their talent, in my opinion. One little-known method for recruiting and retaining a more diverse workforce is to actually seek and retain a more varied client base. From my perspective, if you do not have a diverse and inclusive client base, your efforts to diversify your workforce will be twice as challenging.

An easy way to directly make your hiring process more inclusive is to broaden the scope of your interview process through interview panels. The larger and more diverse your hiring body, the more inclusive and diverse your new hires will be. A panel filled with a cross-section of employees can help to eliminate bias, as well as highlight your own company’s inclusive nature and diversity to the interviewee. And of course, having multiple people conduct an interview allows for different perspectives and insights on a candidate. Instead of basing a hiring decision off the opinion of one person, the decision is made based on the law of averages after factoring in disparate opinions.

Make a list of biases to look out for and develop an action point to counter each bias. Keep in mind that a lot of biases in hiring practices can be unconscious. Among unconscious biases, there’s one that relies on heuristics where the recruiter would take mental shortcuts while analyzing a candidate’s ability to fulfill the job. Recruiters favor the use of heuristics when they need to make quick judgments while they have little data or are cognitively overloaded. When you’re not sure about hiring a candidate due to insufficient information, don’t go for heuristics, schedule another brief round instead. Go through your hiring process. See if you can spot any biases based on the list you’ve made. Have a look at it with your team and address them.

One way to overcome your unconscious bias when hiring is to utilise work sample tests as part of the interview process. Work sample tests help me evaluate candidates side by side, allowing me to make a selection based on merit, rather than on the subjective opinions I may have formed about each candidate and their abilities. This method also works because I don't have to rely on the candidate's own assessment of their capabilities, which is also likely to be biased.

If you want to ensure that you have inclusive, diverse hiring practices, then pay a little more attention to where you actually post your open jobs. When looking for future employees to bring something unique to your company culture, look toward community boards that appeal to these people. If your employment listings are only seen by the same people every time, then you're only going to get the same candidates to apply every time.

Companies that make an effort to reach out to diverse talent when looking to hire can significantly improve the diversity of their hiring process. It is advisable to spend more time and resources in your diversity talent scouting by employing a multi-faceted strategy communicated through all the departments in your company. At LuckLuckGo, talent sourcing on different closed professional groups is one of our most effective ways to look for diverse talent to add to our company. In such groups on social media, we improve our chances of getting a worthy and qualified referral from other professionals looking to improve diversity hiring. Our presence on such a platform is also effective in raising the quality of our network hence better talent sourcing whenever we need to hire more diversely or inclusively.

Make an accessible website. When job candidates are studying your careers page and browsing through your website to learn more about your company, the information should be clear and accessible to all readers. You can include alternate text for images, caption videos, and choose color palettes readable to people with various visual impairments. You can design your website so that keyboard-only users can navigate it smoothly. Making your website widely accessible makes hiring more inclusive.

To develop inclusive hiring practices, be sure to discuss your company culture during the hiring process. Inclusive hiring is crucial to be able to build a diverse, unique team that can add to your innovative ideas and increase your productivity levels. During the very first interview, introduce each aspect of what has built your company culture, and stress how important each step is to develop an inclusive team. Also, be sure to include this information in your company goal statements.

Establishing an inclusive hiring process is important, and that means being transparent about your employee demographic within the company. Be honest about diversity on your current team and make key employees available to answer questions from the candidate. You want to ensure that candidates feel as comfortable as possible. Facilitating their connection to current employees shows you're willing to be transparent and have open, honest communication. It also creates camaraderie so that whoever is hired feels more comfortable when starting out. You should do everything you can to ensure a candidate's success.

Similar people tend to use the same channels to apply for jobs and sometimes employers can restrict their candidate pool too. To bring more diverse applicants, get creative about where you advertise your job openings. Post on different job boards or use social media to attempt to attract talent. By changing the way you’ve always done things, you can connect with applicants who may have overlooked your open job position in the past.

It is understandable that introducing changes to hiring practices will be difficult, especially when diversity hiring requires more than just a policy change. To adopt and develop inclusive hiring practices, an organization has to put to work a coordinated effort that involves just about every rung of the hierarchy. This is because a change as impactful as this one will indeed require the active involvement of everyone, from leaders to the last employee. Moreover, since these changes can only be implemented with sustained efforts, a well-coordinated approach will prove crucial.

There are a number of ways to use technology to support your inclusive hiring practices. An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) can help you keep track of where each candidate is in the hiring process, as well as their qualifications. You can also use an ATS to score candidates based on their responses to questions, which can help take some of the subjectivity out of the decision-making process. Use social media to broaden your reach and connect with potential candidates from underrepresented groups. Utilize online networking platforms and job boards that focus specifically on diversity. Sending interview reminders and follow-up messages via text or chat can be a more efficient way to communicate with candidates, and reduce absenteeism during interviews.

Entrepreneurs should know that building a healthy and inclusive workplace takes some effort. Starting an inclusion council early on in the company's birth will help set the foundation for an inclusive workplace. This council can consist of leaders of different backgrounds who meet regularly to discuss current inclusive measures, how they're working, and the next steps. They must also gather anonymous feedback on these measures from employees at all levels within the organization and incorporate their insights into the DE&I strategy. Doing so ensures everyone has a voice. The council's ultimate goal will be to implement proactive measures that foster a scalable and sustainable culture of inclusion in the workplace.

If you standardize the recruiting process so every candidate experiences the same interview format, questions, and test projects, the playing field is the same for everyone, this way you can assess candidates in a fair manner. It also can be important in defending against allegations of hiring discrimination.

If you want to be more inclusive when it comes to hiring, try posting on websites outside of the big names like Monster or Indeed. There are job boards that can help attract a more diverse pool of talent like Diversity.com, Pink Jobs, and Fairygodboss. It’s also important to remember that people search for jobs on many different types of devices, so make sure your job descriptions are easily skimmable and concise.