August 10, 2022
If you have been in the recruitment space for more than a year - you would know how much emphasis organizations give to diversity in their workforce. It’s a vital aspect of any recruitment strategy. Contrary to popular opinion, diversity hiring is a lot more than presenting your brand as a modern and inclusive destination for the workforce. Recruiters need to understand that diversity is not a mere formality. The objective is to attain sustainable growth with diverse talent, bringing innovative ideas and approaches and constantly challenging the norm.
Statistics don't tell any different story either:
More often than not, early-stage recruiters and executives are not aware of the impact of diversity in their workforce. Hence, awareness is the first roadblock that needs to be dealt with before creating diversity hiring strategies and executing them.
It should be noted that consistent efforts toward diversity hiring also help organizations attract the top ‘creamy-layer’ talent and retain their best talent. But how do you build a diverse talent culture from scratch? How do you work on diversity hiring amidst the continuous demand at your organization and serious competition for quality talent?
We will discuss everything you need about diversity hiring - initiation, gameplan, and retention.
Let’s take a quick recall on what exactly is diversity hiring.
Humans are intrinsically biased - it’s not a personal trait. Our brains are programmed to favor information that supports our beliefs and ignore facts that contradict them. So even after being educated, trained for our professions and practicing fairness – we subconsciously consider various personal factors while finding and hiring candidates.
Diversity hiring is a recruitment approach that ensures hiring decisions are not affected by biases like candidate’s age, race, gender, ethnicity, religion, and more factors that have no relation to their skillset and job performance.
Businesses cannot run on only skills. A diverse workforce ensures a higher level of innovation and sustainable growth. Amidst this highly competitive hiring market, having a diverse set of employees helps you attract the top candidates from various backgrounds.
Having employees with diverse perspectives only adds up to the power and utility of businesses. In fact, 94% of the Fortune 100 companies succeeded after practicing gender diversity in their executive positions.
Organizations are constantly aiming to scale up and go international. The key to attaining diversity in your workforce today is to focus on a global talent pool and hire candidates from around the world. You don’t just add up valuable resources in terms of relevance. Still, candidates also speak different languages, come up with new perspectives and help your organization to enhance its cultural competence.
A diverse workforce triggers business growth in ways one could never imagine. From attracting better candidates to retaining the best employees through inclusion and engagement – diversity ensures people are more motivated to work for your organization than ever. As productivity is directly related to diversity, inclusion, and trust among the workforce – a surge in profitability and talent retention is guaranteed.
Here are a few reasons organizations cannot afford to skip diversity hiring.
The primary reason why maintaining diversity in your workforce is vital – it attracts quality talent and helps you retain the best employees. 67% of all job seekers globally consider diversity important while applying to opportunities.
If you don’t care about diversity and stick with the same hiring approach, your organization’s growth will eventually nullify. Stretching your recruitment search for enhancing diversity helps you discover and attract great talent to your workforce.
It’s not only the job-seeking candidates. Over 57% of employed people want their employers to improve diversity. Hiring diversity has become more crucial than ever to attract high-quality talent and keep your employees’ loyalty and trust. Both of which primarily drive a company’s growth and sustainability.
Diversity hiring has proved to be a game-changing strategy for organizations time and again. Organizations with over 30% of female executives are considerably more likely to outperform companies with fewer women executives.
Enterprises are execution-driven, but the ideas make them stand apart from the competition. Diversity in hiring means bringing in immensely varying perspectives to your team, further triggering innovation. According to a survey by McKinsey, organizations with above-average diversity registered 19% higher innovation revenues than others.
Wondering how diversity affects innovation and creativity within teams? Well, the crux of solving problems effectively is to try out as many approaches as possible. Diverse teams that discuss naturally tend to have many questions for others. Hence, they can identify efficient solutions while being customer-centric at the same time.
Diversity hiring also plays a crucial role in boosting the creative strength of your teams. When people from various cultural, social, and ethnic backgrounds collaborate and leverage their experiences, the emerging innovation is unmatchable. Especially in creative spaces like content and graphic design, diverse talents can work together to do wonders.
How the entire workforce including potential candidates views you as an employer plays a major role in your recruitment plans. Optimizing your hiring diversity helps you in building a high-quality talent pool. While interacting and engaging with diverse talent, your organization attains high awareness as it appeals to numerous candidates, other employers, and customers.
Additionally, being an ‘equal opportunity employer’ adds immense value to your employer brand. Diversity hiring helps you build positive relations with various communities and stakeholder groups related to those candidates.
At the end of the day, employer branding is all about building trust. When you scale diversity hiring, you win the trust and credibility of the external workforce and your employees. A good employer brand has exceptional benefits – it makes talent hunting and acquisition much easier for recruiters.
Optimizing your diversity hiring enables you to position your workforce as an inclusive destination. It conveys that you are dedicated to building a fascinating work environment for your employees. Making talented people from various backgrounds work together boosts employee engagement and loyalty.
When your employees feel included in engagements consistently, they develop a bond with the organization. It further motivates them to do everything possible for the company’s growth, and productivity significantly increases. Developing an inclusive work culture through diversity hiring also instills great employee trust.
As a recruiter, it’s more problem-solving than anything. As people working with you feel taken care of and believe in the company and their colleagues – human resource utilization reaches its peak. You also optimize employee retention that way, saving a fortune for your company and not forgetting – getting rid of heavy recruitment efforts.
What happens when people who have distinguished -
Unite to work towards a common mission? Undoubtedly, organizational growth is a big output, but personal growth for employees and valuable knowledge transfer practices cannot be ignored.
Your employees learn the most while working in teams rather than attending formal training. As diversity among the workforce promotes engagement and boosts conversations, knowledge transfer between employees becomes natural. As a result, non-experienced individuals get the opportunity to learn quickly, feedback becomes streamlined, and employees are more involved in getting productive insights from others.
The top 25% of enterprises in terms of cultural diversity are 36% more profitable than the bottom one-fourth. Another research says that diverse teams are 70% more likely to capture and penetrate new markets.
The power that lies in collective tested and verified decision-making is beyond what you could even imagine. Diverse perspectives not only help prolifically shape the work environment but also push the entire workforce’s productivity.
We all know when productivity is improved, business growth is inevitable. Moreover, effective collaborations and a more energetic team are things all businesses consistently seek.
Diversity hiring becomes even more important for organizations looking to scale globally and grow their profitability. Understanding customer behavior in various cultures and ethnicities is impossible for people not belonging to those groups. Hence, hiring global candidates to understand the culture they represent and establish diversity in your organization heavily contributes to your business growth and profitability.
More often than not, the terms - diversity and inclusion are used interchangeably, which is wrong. These are two different notions. An organization can be diverse and not inclusive or vice-versa. While both play a vital role in a business’s success, it is equally important for you to understand the difference so as to prepare distinguished strategies.
Diversity refers to the characteristics based on which one person can be differentiated from another. It represents people belonging to different races, ethnicities, gender, socioeconomic background, religion, education, and more factors. A diverse workforce consists of people from various backgrounds. The distinct experiences and perspectives brought in by different people give birth to innovations and help companies grow sustainably.
On the other hand, inclusion means building an environment that makes a diverse workplace more engaging, productive, and innovative. The objective is to establish a comfortable yet inclusive environment where your employees feel welcome and valued. Treating everyone fairly and respectfully, offering equal opportunities, and serving equal resources can be considered inclusion.
While inclusion has a lot of benefits for organizations, given their growth and productivity – it is a key advantage for society. Inclusion usually follows diversity while implemented in a workforce. However, both the practices are complementary and interdependent. Inclusion is putting in efforts to support diversity in an organization.
For example - Suppose a recruiter managed to hire more diverse people to their company. If these newly acquired employees feel valued in the work environment, get equal opportunities, and are respected, the organization has successfully included them through its strategy and environment.
Now that you know why hiring diversity is important in shaping your enterprise’s success, it’s time to discuss a diversity hiring strategy. But what does that mean?
Defining goals, accountabilities and the action plan for recruiting diverse talent are referred to as a diversity hiring strategy. As business dynamics keep evolving – so does the demand for talent and hiring strategies.
It’s a candidate-driven world that we live in right now, and recruiters cannot afford to miss out on diversity hiring which helps them win top talent. Here are a few impactful strategies that you can adapt to create a diverse and inclusive workspace.
One of the most efficient strategies to transform your organization’s workforce diversity is consistently sourcing candidates. Recruiters need to discover diverse talent pools with candidates from across the world. It doesn’t matter if you source active or passive job seekers - just focus on the quality of talent and ensure adding candidates from different ethnicities, socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds, races, religions, and other relevant demographics.
Modern recruiters never really stop sourcing candidates and this gives them the convenience of not rushing to get candidates when requirements arise. Building a talent pipeline is critical now as the recruitment market is becoming more volatile.
Especially if you’re at an early stage of building a diverse workforce, sourcing candidates by outreach is the primary way. It’s always to have great control over who you want to include in your teams rather than filtering among hundreds of applicants.
Our approach with job descriptions is mostly centred around role requirements and perks for the same. This needs to change if you want to work on diversity hiring. A job description is the primary driver of your message to candidates as an employer – you cannot miss out on inclusivity as a core aspect.
The job description should convey that your organization follows the ‘everyone is equal’ approach. Ensure you share a concisely written description in simple language.
With the aim of diversity hiring, you need to restructure your employee referral program. No doubt, it’s one of the most cost-efficient and time-saving strategies – but it can harm your diverse hiring goals. Naturally biased employees tend to refer to people more like them. While the requirement of talent might well be addressed, diversity hiring isn’t, and this is what you need to change.
Ask your employees for diverse referrals, and don’t forget to reward successful conversions. Focus on getting referrals from people belonging to your target group. For example: If you want more women in your workforce, ask all the female employees to refer candidates.
Another prolific way to connect to diverse talent through referrals is by leveraging your network. Use platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook and ask your network to refer you diverse candidates for hire.
One of the biggest roadblocks in creating diversity-rich teams is setting up your interviews right. Cognitive bias involved in interviews can halt your diversity hiring goals if not worked upon. Your interview process, interviewers and best practices must continuously optimize with changing requirements.
To attract quality candidates, you need to position yourself as an employer of choice. Prioritize diversity hiring and talk about your workforce diversity publicly. When you connect your employer brand with diversity, inclusion and equity – people want to work with you because of your values. It gives them an idea of how innovative and inclusive working with such a team would be while interacting with your brand.
Sourcing quality talent while taking care of your workforce diversity is a mammoth task for recruiters. Outbound recruiting should be your core strategy when the aim is to enhance hiring diversity. On the other hand - searching, identifying, connecting, and engaging with candidates manually can deprive you of investing time in planning for your diversity hiring objectives. Not to forget the intense competition for top talent out there - it’s now critical that you focus on the more human-centric tasks by automating the admin and management work.
Nurturebox enables your recruitment teams to automate their candidate sourcing. Not only does the solution make sourcing easier and faster, but it also helps optimize the overall recruiting process. With Nurturebox’s Chrome plugin, you can ace your diversity hiring game by consistently sourcing quality talent.
From identifying qualified candidates and adding them to your sourcing campaigns to automating your outreach and engagement, Nurturebox helps you scale your diversity hiring. The comprehensive tool integrates your existing ATS and ensures seamless candidate management without much human intervention. As it enables you to have complete control over sourcing – you can always test out various talent pools considering the diversity requirements.
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:
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.
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:
While the practices discussed above are primary responsibilities of a Content Marketer, they also need to be proactive with
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.
Apart from having relevant industry experience, a good Content Marketer must possess the following 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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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:
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
Requirements
Soft Skills
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
