Hiring Diversity and The Role It Plays in The Culture of Your Organization

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:

• Diverse teams are 87% better at making decisions - a trait that drives business growth.

• Organizations maintaining a healthy diversity among their workforce are 70% more likely to capture new markets.

• The revenue goes up by 19% for diverse teams compared to others.

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. 

What is Diversity Hiring?

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.

Why do Organizations Need Diversity Hiring?

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.

1. Helps you attract and retain great talent

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.

2. Boosts your innovation and creative strengths 

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.

3. Workforce diversity adds value to employer brand

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.

4. Enhances the work culture and productivity

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.

5. Maximizes the effect of knowledge transfer

What happens when people who have distinguished -

• Skills 
• Talent
• Educational qualifications
• Experiences
• Cultural backgrounds 

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.

6. Enables businesses to scale and grow profitability

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.

Diversity vs. Inclusion: A Brief Comparison

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.

How to Build a Diversity Hiring Strategy?

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.

1. Source Candidates Proactively

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.

2. Optimize Your Job Description

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.

3. Revamp Your Employee Referral Policy

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.

4. Redesign Your Current Interview Procedure

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.

• Ensure the interview panels represent diverse backgrounds 

• Interviewers should be educated and trained on avoiding biases

• The interview process should eliminate any kind of possible bias and should be standardized to ensure fair treatment.

• Each candidate should be evaluated based on the same criteria

5. Establish an Employer Brand 

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.

Scale Your Diversity Hiring with Automation

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.