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Top 7 Things to Ensure Diversity in Hiring

August 16, 2023

The talent requirements for businesses have evolved at a pace no one anticipated amidst the continuous competitive heat. Organizations now don’t just need talented employees, but fresh and innovative minds who bring in diversely varying perspectives. Subsequently, diversity hiring is not a ‘nice-to-have’ aspect for companies anymore, it’s not just about positioning yourself as an equal opportunity employer either. Diversity in your workforce has a deep impact on your business – rooted way more significantly than you would believe.

A report by Mckinsey stated that the top one-fourth of organizations ranked as per diversity in executive teams were 21% more likely to have good profitability than the bottom one-fourth of companies. On the other hand, the bottom companies with not enough gender and ethnic diversity underperform by 29% in profitability. 

Diversity hiring is not a recently emerging subject, it has been in the buzz around for decades now. Wondering why it has not yet been adopted fully into the system? Because businesses tend to see diversity as a numbers problem rather than a radical aspect – which it truly is. 

Another major reason for diversity hiring being downplayed is its long-term nature. You are least likely to see results within a year or two, however, diversity in your workforce will yield greater results than you would even expect.

The need of the hour is not just awareness – we have moved beyond that, it’s rather optimizing the journey. Organizations know how important diversity hiring is, but the execution is missing out. But you don’t need to worry, as you’re already here. We will discuss the ins and outs of implementing diversity hiring and everything surrounding it – stick around for a brief insight!

What is Diversity Hiring?: A Recall

Diversity hiring refers to sourcing and recruiting talent from diverse backgrounds, ensuring an inclusive talent acquisition journey for candidates and eliminating the roadblocks that prevent candidates from having equal opportunity in recruitment. 

No doubt hiring diversity plays a huge role in the culture of your organization, however, it has a broader significance. As a business entity, ensuring diversity in your hiring is your contribution to making society better and aligned with socio-economic balance. 

The idea of diversity is to encompass people from different age groups, genders, ethnicity, cultures, experiences, background values and perspectives. It’s these characteristics that make people truly diverse. The most successful employers have one thing in common – they constantly look for people with innovative thinking and creativity which can be derived from these aspects of diversity.

Contrary to popular opinion, having diversity in your workforce is as important as having the most skilful people working for your organization. Why? Two pathways to answer this question:

  • From an organization’s perspective - innovation, creativity, various background experiences and unique thought processes are the primary reasons.
  • From a candidate’s perspective - inclusive culture, equal opportunity and meaningful careers draw them toward organizations that value diversity.

You probably got a birds-eye view of what diversity hiring is, and why is it vital for both ends of recruitment. Let’s take a deep dive into what are the more crucial positives of diversity hiring in the modern recruitment space.

Advantages of Diversity Hiring

There are numerous benefits of introducing diversity hiring for your organization. We discussed companies with higher diversity in their workforce outperforming others and hitting higher profits. How does it happen? What are the tangible advantages of diversity hiring that lead to those prolific results? Let’s find out:

  1. Various Perspectives

A diverse workforce with varying backgrounds, views, skills and experiences means your business would involve more perspectives. Each individual’s access point contributes to crucial analysis and decisions for enterprises. Planning, preparing and executing business strategies successfully – requires a multi-dimensional approach which is an outcome of diversity hiring. 

On the other hand, employees in a diverse workplace would grow themselves faster. Having access to a diverse in-office network is often underrated, but works wonders for knowledge transfer company culture. It’s definitely a win-win for both ends!

  1. Amplified Creativity

Creativity is a direct function of high exposure and various viewpoints. Diversity ensures your employees approach the same objective in widely differing ways, which exponentially boosts creativity. Add up to that the collaborative power of teams with people from different backgrounds – you get a huge variety of fresh ideas consistently. It should also be kept in mind that the creativity bar, once set high, becomes an inherent trait of an organization. It just stays in the culture and the next batch of talent quickly becomes the flag bearer.

  1. Fast and Efficient Problem Solving

Businesses are all about solving problems – you would agree with this. What it further means is that problem-solving capability is the primary skill of any professional. Also, it is one of the priorities for recruiters while evaluating candidates. 

Organizations and teams with a diverse workforce are able to solve problems much more efficiently and faster too. How? More views, background knowledge and varying experiences mean diverse solutions to the target problems. 

  1. Boost in Innovation

In this crazily competitive era, the only way for enterprises to sustain their growth is through constant innovation. Whether it be tech, growth strategies, marketing campaigns and even recruitment – innovative measures are the need right now. 

Did you know that diversity in an organization is one of the primary drivers of innovation? As per research by Josh Bersin, inclusive organizations with a diverse workforce are 1.7 times more likely to be the innovation leaders in their industry. It’s vital to understand that with access to more perspectives and viewpoints – teams have a better chance of innovation through collaborative steps.

  1. Uplifted Employee Engagement

Employee engagement has a huge impact on your workforce’s productivity and hence business outcomes. Engaging actively also enhances your organization’s work culture as your employees feel closely included in the organization.

Diversity in the workforce promotes inclusion and engagement is the by-product. A survey performed on employees from three different industries suggested that employee engagement is a direct result of diversity and inclusion – another major reason why you need to practice diversity hiring.

  1. Effective Decision-Making

An unusually less talked about fact around decision-making is that – better decisions are made when we have more choices. It is important to remember that choices are nothing but different thought processes and approaches. 

Now with a diverse talent pool – come diverse perspectives, backgrounds and experiences, which naturally enable teams to make effective decisions. Catering to the rising competition and multi-dimensional needs of a business is no joke, but optimal and fast decisions work wonders.

7 Ways You can Ensure Diversity Hiring in Your Organization 

Like any other recruitment plan or business goal, diversity hiring needs a strategic approach too. Before you begin on your mission to optimize diversity in your workforce, answer the following questions subjectively:

  • What’s the current status of your workforce diversity?
  • What are your long-term business goals that will be talent-driven?
  • What is your diversity hiring goal?
  • How do you approach improving diversity in your organization?
  • How do you measure diversity hiring metrics?

Once you answer these questions, it’s time to move on to the execution plan. We have studied numerous recruiting strategies, diversity-building methods, hiring case studies and more resources – to come out with the top 10 ways you can ensure successful diversity hiring for your organization and acquire talent that helps your business grow steadily. Let’s get started!

  1. Prioritize Diversity Hiring Mindset

Our mindset drives whatever we do or plan to do in life. So the priority while setting up diversity hiring should be aligning your and the team’s mindset in the right way for diversity hiring. 

The focus of the entire recruitment team should be narrowed down to diversity. That also means they need to avoid convenient hiring and hiring just based on the skills.

You know the importance and positives of diversity hiring, but you need to explain this to your recruitment teams. Additionally, make sure you follow these two practices while prioritizing diversity hiring:

  • Resources around diversity hiring are much needed for your recruiters, especially when you're just starting out. Share the relevant guides they would need to recruit diverse candidates.
  • Give them enough time as you start diversity hiring because it differs deeply from the traditional methods. You also don’t want them to fall for hiring fast without thinking much. The focus should be on filling the diversity and culture gaps rather than just filling positions. 
  1. Revamp Your Job Ads

The primary way of sourcing candidates for most recruiters is job posting platforms – and to begin with the plan, you need to revamp those hiring ads. You might observe one of the two scenarios – either your messaging is targeted to a very broad range of candidates or it’s addressing targeted demographics. Analyze the results of those job ads and take relevant action. If the outcomes weren’t good enough, try pivoting your messaging in a job ad for more specific demographics or for a broader range of candidates.

In every job post, ensure that you’re clearly conveying to your target audience about your ideal candidate persona. 

  1. Practice Collaborative Interviews 

The transformation brought by collaborative hiring is no secret. Even the most successful corporations are practising it for their critical hiring processes and observing great results. The strategy can be a fantastic fuel for diversity hiring. As the main idea behind optimizing recruitment for diversity is removing bias, collaborative hiring would definitely add up numerous perspectives and cut down the chances of certain candidates getting an upper hand due to reasons totally unrelated to their abilities. 

An ideal collaborative hiring setup involves recruitment teams made by recruiters, executives and corresponding vertical heads. The final judgement is passed on to the hiring manager by this team and then the decision is taken. 

  1. Build Systems to Evaluate Candidates

Having dedicated repeatable systems and structures in place makes recruitment a lot easier. The objective of building systems is to templatize the candidate evaluation to remove any kind of bias involved. This will not only help in boosting diversity hiring but will help organizations and recruiters save a plethora of time and effort. 

Create systems for your entire recruitment process including interview flow and evaluating standards. Every candidate must be assessed on the same parameters in order to serve truly equal opportunities. This will help recruiters get rid of confusion because of long recruitment journeys, and organizations maintain diversity in hiring. 

  1. Assess and Optimize Recruitment Team’s Diversity 

Is your internal team that is responsible for conducting recruitment diverse enough? Have you evaluated the interview distribution? Is the same person doing screening every time? 

The core of your diversity hiring begins at the centre - your recruitment crew. Make sure you periodically test out the hiring team’s diversity with respect to their cultural backgrounds, experiences, seniority levels and perspectives. If your recruiting team does not have a diverse set of employees - it’s high time you should add diversity to the hiring team first by acquiring talent.

Working on your recruitment team’s diversity is vital for delivering a candidate experience filled with satisfaction. Additionally, top talent is drawn by diversity in an organization – and recruitment team being at the forefront, it’s always beneficial to optimize the diversity within. 

  1. Focus on Retaining Diverse Candidates and Nurture Them

One of the most crucial things you can do to maintain diversity in your organization is to take effective measures to retain candidates. Establish a comfortable and enjoyable environment for them in the organization. Especially for the ones you hired recently as a part of your diversity hiring campaign, keep nurturing and supporting them for all their needs and expectations. Find out if they are settled in their internal communication, bonding well with the team, working closely with their managers and if they’re experiencing inclusion in the workspace. 

For acing your diversity hiring and optimizing the diversity of the workforce in your organizations, continuous nurturing of diverse hires is immensely important. If you want your organization to be known for its diversity, you and the entire recruitment team need to be proactive in establishing diversity seriously and creating a fruitful environment among your workforce.

  1. Leverage Technology to Get Desired Diversity Hiring Results

Going back to where we began, recruitment today is too complex. All the strategies and optimal diversity hiring practices need immeasurable efforts. Add to that – the competition for top talent. With so much already on your plate left to figure out, how do you ensure diversity in your hiring? 

From sourcing candidates to engaging, screening, filtering, scheduling, updating the pipeline and the list of tasks for recruiters never ends. We feel you and fret not - let’s discuss how you can delegate all of this and make technology work for you. 

Your hiring process can be comprehensively streamlined by leveraging a recruitment automation tool. An automated solution will help you meet your hiring targets while primarily taking care of diversity and inclusion at the same time. The aim is to get rid of admin tasks and repeated activities which form a majority of recruiting. Further, you would be able to concentrate your efforts on analytical decision-making tasks of the recruitment journey.

How Nurturebox Helps You Optimize Diversity Hiring?

To ace diversity hiring, you want to source diverse candidates, perform consistent outreach, engage with them proactively and manage the recruitment pipeline for your organization. To summarize, it means handling hundreds of recruiting journeys. Although you’re working with a team of recruiters, investing your time in mundane tasks would harm your productivity and act as a barrier to your diversity hiring goals.

Nurturebox streamlines the recruiting challenges for you through end-to-end sourcing automation. What does that mean? Stay organized with your sourcing, invest no time in mundane tasks and generate the best results for your diversity hiring. Here’s how Nurturebox helps recruitment teams:

  • Add candidates to campaigns & integrate with ATS: Source candidates like a pro, use professional platforms like LinkedIn to find candidates’ contact details and add them to your sourcing campaigns. Integrate Nurturebox with your existing ATS or opt for Recruitee plugin to automate your candidate pipeline management.
  • Outreach and engagement on Auto-pilot: It is as exciting as it sounds. Nurturebox enables your multi-channel outreach and engagement with candidates through LinkedIn, WhatsApp and emails. And you do not miss out on personalization too – engage with diverse candidates like never before to ensure you never miss out on your hiring goals.
  • Track and analyze your progress: The most successful recruiters have achieved success because they are data-driven. With Nurturebox, you know what works and can pivot if required at the right time. Track your sourcing and engagement campaign analytics to double down on what’s working optimally. 

Diversity hiring is not a challenge too complex – it just needs enough awareness and the strategies to execute successfully. The recruitment space is now more demanding than ever and automation is the key to fulfilling modern organizations’ never-ending needs. Nurturebox’s Chrome extension allows you to simplify talent sourcing, engagement and management to its core. It’s vital to shift your focus from management tasks to the analysis of candidates to ace your diversity hiring.

Amidst today’s noisy digital world, brands find it challenging to create meaningful connections with their customer base and target audience. Getting the target consumer’s attention and persuading them to buy from you gets even trickier. Hence, content marketing has become more crucial than ever for brands to attract, educate, and retain customers.

Content creation is a top priority for 80% of marketers, and there is no reason it shouldn’t be. Consistent, high-quality, and engaging content impacts your audience’s decisions through education and persuasion.

Depending on your business goals and requirements, the role of Content Marketers you hire will vary. The primary responsibilities revolve around forming consistent brand messaging and deciding upon a unique and identifiable voice, style, and pitch across various distribution channels.

From raising brand awareness to attracting a relevant audience to your website, boosting social media presence and engagement, generating leads, and building brand loyalty – content marketing drives all the growth efforts for your brand. When done effectively, it can help you:

  • Build positive brand awareness
  • Make your audience stick around for longer
  • Get better traction on social media
  • Gain more trust of your audience than ever
  • Generate qualified leads
  • Improve conversion rates
  • Boost business visibility with SEO
  • Position your brand as an authority
  • Cultivate loyal brand fans

While content marketing is a broad role with numerous areas of expertise involved, it’s vital to thoroughly understand your company’s current marketing goals and the related requirements. In this blog, we will dive deep into the step-by-step approach to hiring a Content Marketer.

What is The Role of a Content Marketer?

A Content Marketer must be deeply passionate about telling your brand’s story to the world. The objective is to educate and nurture the target audience to establish brand authority using thought-leadership and drive more people to buy from you.

As a candidate is expected to be a mediator between the brand and the target audience, they are primarily responsible for planning, creating, and sharing valuable content to grow their company’s awareness and engagement to bring more business.

To be more specific, the role of a Content Marketer requires a perfect blend of creativity and attention to detail in an individual. It’s a balancing role, as they need to ensure creating content that resonates and strengthens business relationships, using strategies that position your business as authentic and problem-solving.

Take a look at the core responsibilities of a Content Marketer that most businesses expect them to take over:

  • Research and Competitor Analysis: The first and foremost step to creating a content marketing strategy is effective initial research. It not only helps a Content Marketer understand the nuances of the industry through competitor analysis but also study and understand the target audience thoroughly.
  • Building Content Marketing Plans: Once the competitor research and target audience analysis is done, a Content Marketer needs to work on the different plans for all the business objectives, targeted channels, segments of the audience, and the bigger marketing strategy. A content marketing plan typically consists of:
  • Specific goals along with a pre-decided timeline
  • Various channels to be targeted for content distribution
  • Types of content to be created
  • Budget for the entire staff, outsourced services, and paid promotion (Collabs and Ads)
  • Creating Editorial Calendar: Creating, managing, and maintaining a content calendar is one of the most crucial responsibilities of a Content Marketer. It is a centralized visual document that enables effective collaboration among the marketing team and helps Content Marketers ensure on-time production and delivery.
  • Content Creation: Once the strategy and calendar have been approved by relevant stakeholders, Content Marketers need to do the on-ground work. This task usually depends on the scale of your company and content marketing strategy. Suppose an organization already has a set of writers, then the Content Marketer doesn’t need to create content by themselves.
  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Producing quality content that educates your target audience and resonates with them, isn’t enough. You need to optimize your content creation to make it search engine-friendly. While most companies need a dedicated SEO specialist for keyword research and planning, Content Marketers need to closely collaborate with them and should be well-versed in the basics of SEO.

While the practices discussed above are primary responsibilities of a Content Marketer, they also need to be proactive with

  • Content editing and ensuring adherence to a certain style guide    
  • Continous publishing and distributing content
  • Measuring and analyzing performance

How to Hire a Content Marketer: Step-By-Step?

Content marketing has become the key to driving growth for businesses. Unlike a few years ago, it’s not possible now to get away with a one-person team for content marketing. You need deeply trained individuals for specialist roles.

Let’s now dive into the step-by-step approach of hiring a Content Marketer. But before you even source your first candidate, you should have a clear expectation of the skillset and experience to look out for top content marketing candidates.

Top Must-Have Skills in a Content Marketer

Apart from having relevant industry experience, a good Content Marketer must possess the following skills.

  1. Excellent Writing Skills

A Content Marketer’s prior skillset should be writing excellent attention-grabbing content. From long-form blog posts to website copy, ad copies, social media content, video scripts, emails, newsletters, e-books, whitepapers, and more – a Content Marketer should be able to adapt to the business’s specific requirements and create quality content.

  1. Audience Research

Identifying user behavior is vital for framing the story in the right direction. So a Content Marketer must know how to identify and analyze the needs and pain points to develop a buyer persona. User research can be performed through social listening, relevant communities, in-person calls with customers, analyzing sales call recordings, and more.

  1. Keyword Research

Creating valuable thought-leadership content isn’t enough. Researching the right set of keywords is an essential skill to further educate your target audience on the Whys, Hows and Whats of your business, and have your website rank on Google.

  1. Data-oriented Content

Content that’s not backed by relevant data points does not build enough trust. Experienced content marketing professionals would always prefer data over hollow claims. No doubt that only data doesn’t help a content piece succeed, but it’s essential..

  1. Project Management, Planning, and Publishing –

A Content Marketer is also expected to break down and analyze the pain points to turn keyword research into content ideas. So a professional must be able to identify and solve content gaps.

Further, they must know how to create a content calendar, decide the different types of content, and choose relevant platforms to publish and schedule marketing campaigns.

  1. Content Promotion

Creating a valuable content piece, for example - an ebook, isn’t enough. Your content marketing team needs to promote it proactively for bringing enough attention and engagement.

  1. Performance Analysis

Setting up goals and plans is one thing, but continuously executing, measuring, and analyzing content performance is another. A Content Marketer should always be monitoring key performance parameters to figure out the upcoming plans with the necessary updates required.

Not to forget - stakeholders and marketing heads need the performance reports regularly. So Content Marketers must be able to collect and comprehend all the data to make it worth presenting.

Step 1: Create a Candidate Persona

Let’s sort out the priorities first, and decide the type of content marketing candidates you want to recruit. From exceptional research skills to storytelling, communication skills, relationship building, audience engagement, and more capabilities must be comprehensively considered. Identify and break down the skill requirements for Content Marketers:

  • What are the educational qualification criteria for the role?
  • How many years and what type of work experience do you want in candidates?
  • What are the specific skill sets you’re looking for?
  • Which industry experience would you primarily prefer?
  • Are there any tools your candidates should be hands-on with?
  • What are some personality traits that will fit your company?
  • Where do they look for a new job?
  • What are their career and life goals?

Forming a candidate persona by answering all these questions would ensure you are not shooting in the dark while sourcing candidates. Further, it helps you determine the traits of the ideal candidate, and plan your sourcing and recruitment strategy further.

Step 2: Document the Role Requirements and Decide on Your Recruiting Process

Next step is determining your role requirements suiting primarily to organizational needs and business goals. A content marketing professional is expected to own the entire content strategy, creation, and distribution. But what about your business’s unique requirements?

You might need someone comfortable with frequently creating long-form content pieces like blogs, ebooks, or whitepapers, or creating engaging video content based on your industry trends.

Talk to various relevant stakeholders for seeking the complete detailed company requirements for the role.

Before you enter the recruitment funnel, outline your talent acquisition process. Identify various strategies, channels, and other informational insights you would need – and maintain a collaborative document.

As you update the tactics and tweak your recruitment process for meeting hiring requirements optimally – keep your document up to date.

Step 3: Prepare a Content Marketing Job Description

Once you have finalized the role requirements with respect to your current content marketing goals and team, you can start sourcing candidates. Preparing the job description is the first task you’ll need to do.

Here are the necessary components you must have in your job description:

  • Job Title: The position you’re looking to fill. For example - Content Marketing Specialist or Content Marketing Manager.
  • Roles & Responsibilities: An outline of the candidate’s day-to-day activities. From ideation to implementation and the impact on the organization, everything should be covered.  
  • Skill Requirements: Skills and abilities a candidate must have to perform the job successfully.
  • Perks and Benefits: The compensation details, perks of the job, and any other benefits.
  • About the Company: Why should a candidate consider working with your company?

Content Marketer Job Description Template

Role

The job of a Content Marketer is to perform competitor research, create user persona, and write plagiarism-free content for blog articles, social media, and the company website. They need to stay updated on the latest SEO techniques.

Responsibilities

  • Develop, write and deliver persuasive copy for the website, email marketing campaigns, sales collateral, videos, and blogs
  • Build and manage an editorial calendar; coordinate with other content crafters to ensure standards
  • Measure impact and perform analysis to improve KPIs
  • Include and optimize all content for SEO
  • Contribute to the localization of processes and content to ensure consistency across regions
  • Review and implement process changes to drive operational excellence

Requirements

  • Proven content marketing, copywriting, or SEO experience
  • Working knowledge of content management systems like WordPress
  • A well-maintained portfolio of published articles, blogs, copy, etc
  • Proven experience of working under pressure to deliver high quality output in a short span of time
  • Proficiency in all Microsoft Office applications, Google Suite
  • Fluency in English or any other required language

Soft Skills

  • Excellent verbal and written communication skills
  • Excellent writing and editing skills
  • The ability to work in a fast-paced environment
  • The ability to handle multiple projects concurrently
  • Strong attention to detail and the ability to multi-task projects and deliverables

Step 4: Source Candidates

Once you have the tailored job description in hand, it’s now time to do the groundwork and source candidates. Create an attractive job post to promote your job across job boards and social channels.

  • Begin with what to expect from the role at your company?
  • Why should candidates apply for the position?
  • Highlight the growth opportunities
  • State the company vision and mission
  • Briefly describe the recruitment process

Prepare an impactful job post and also execute paid job ad campaigns if required. The next step would be promoting your jobs on various job boards and hiring platforms. You can leverage the following platforms for hiring Content Marketers:

  • LinkedIn
  • Indeed
  • Instahyre
  • ZipRecruiter
  • Monster
  • GlassDoor
  • CareerBuilder

Not to forget - almost 3/4th of the workforce includes passive candidates, so you cannot miss out on passive talent sourcing as well. Reach out to qualified candidates on communities, LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Facebook to offer them suitable opportunities.

Step 5: Evaluate Candidates and Interview Shortlisted Ones

Once you have filtered candidates based on their experience and skills listed on their profile, it’s time to evaluate them deeply. Ask them to create a content strategy for your website, along with a value-adding content piece like a small blog. The topic of the article must fall within the scope of the strategy.

Interview the candidates whose profiles got shortlisted. Keep in mind the parameters covering skills, relevant experience, and personality traits of candidates.

Step 5: Make the Hire

Reach out to selected Content Marketers and communicate about the compensation.

Further, extend your offer letter to all the candidates who have been selected. In the case of passive sourcing, extend to only those who were aligned with you on the compensation and are willing to move forward.

Ensure having a deadline for the joining date and mention the necessary documents required by your recruiting team.

  • Get the required documents and set up the offer agreements with candidates
  • Organize an orientation session for the onboarded candidates
  • Introduce them to the entire team and the marketing teams they will be working with
  • Guide the new candidates about your company management tools and communication channels
  • Provide candidates with forms for benefits and perks like Health Insurance.

Supercharge Your Hiring for Content Marketer with Nurturebox

Inbound candidate sourcing doesn’t work effectively anymore. Do you also find challenges in closing quality candidates through job posts even after spending on ads?

Don’t worry, passive candidate sourcing can be an optimal solution for hiring top content marketing candidates.

Nurturebox is a one-stop talent sourcing and engagement platform which is powered by automation. Here’s how you can source product managers from LinkedIn using Nurturebox:

  • Install the Nurturebox Chrome plugin and sign up.
  • On your LinkedIn profile, start sourcing Content Marketers with boolean searches stating the required experience from targeted locations and including other criteria
  • Add the qualified candidates to your sourcing campaign pipeline with just a click
  • Automate the candidate engagement through email, Whatsapp and LinkedIn direct messages for reaching out and nurturing candidates at scale.

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