How to Measure Diversity in Your Recruiting Efforts?

December 2, 2022

Numerous businesses aim to improve diversity and inclusion in their workforce. At the beginning of 2022, over 35% of HR leaders said diversity is one of their top five priorities for the year. And there’s no reason it shouldn’t be – diversity and inclusion in the workforce help organizations grow in a number of ways.

From boosting your organization’s productivity to ensuring continuous innovation and attracting quality applications when you’re sourcing talent – a healthy diversity pushes

However, when it comes to diversity recruiting, a majority of recruiters are either not prepared for achieving such goals or lack the necessary guidance to hire and retain diverse talent effectively.

The first step towards building a diverse workforce is using the right diversity recruiting metrics to accurately measure the results and analyze the existing gaps. The biggest reason of having multiple diversity metrics is to cater to the unique requirements of each organization.

Recruitment in modern times is heavily inclined toward chasing top-quality talent regardless of gender, ethnicity, background, and culture. With goals like rapid staffing and multifold growth, it’s becoming even more tricky to execute and evaluate diversity recruitment at an organizational level.

But you don’t need to worry as you’re already here. We will break down diversity recruitment, it’s importance, and the top X diversity recruiting metrics you need to keep in mind. As a recruiter, this discussion will not only give you insights to improve your recruitment but also ensure your organization’s long-term growth.

Diversity Hiring in the Present Age: How Does it Look Like?

Diversity hiring refers to practicing recruitment and hiring in a way that is unaffected by biases related to a candidate’s gender, race, age, religion, ethnicity, cultural background, and any characteristics that are irrelevant to their talent or job performance.

Recruiters often struggle in removing these biases thoroughly as unconscious and learned stereotypes are often deeply rooted in human behavior. The goal of incorporating diversity hiring practices and then measuring them using relevant metrics is to ensure a fair and equal recruiting process is followed for all candidates.

Gone are the days when diversity in the workforce was just seen as an aesthetic factor that was ‘nice to have’ for organizations. As continuous improvement and innovation happen with the viewpoints of many, it’s now a necessity for driving growth attracting better candidates, and retaining top talent.

As a recruiter, you need to ensure that your diversity-led recruitment strategy feels welcoming for all candidates belonging to numerous backgrounds. Hence, you can build a diverse workforce that helps your organization with assured innovation and profitable growth.

And all of these are not mere claims or expert opinions, statistics tell a similar story. Take a look:

67% of job seekers consider workplace diversity an important factor when considering employment opportunities
43% of companies with diverse management showed higher profits
Diverse teams are 87% better decision-makers than individuals
Companies employing an equal number of men and women manage to produce up to 41% higher revenue.

Let’s now move forward to the top tips of diversity recruitment for producing optimal recruitment outcomes in your organization.

What Does Diversity Hiring Represent and What It Does Not Mean?

The idea behind diversity hiring is pretty straightforward: to hire candidates only on the basis of their job performance capabilities while mitigating any kind of bias. But unlike other hiring goals, assuring healthy diversity in recruiting is not an easy task.

Even after setting up diversity recruiting goals, organizations need help in delivering them. Regardless of the scale of a business or team size, every organization must follow these do’s and dont’s while practicing and measuring diversity recruiting:

DO set up realistic recruitment goals as per the current diversity status

It’s essential to measure your current team’s diversity before hopping on to fresh diversity recruitment goals. Recruiter capacity planning and numerous other factors come into the picture at this stage of recruiting.

To measure your current diversity, you can either analyze the stored data or ask your employees to fill up anonymous survey forms. Make sure you convey the goals of improving the diversity at your organization clearly. This will help you boost the response rate and more importantly – people will be more than willing to refer relevant candidates.

DON’T just zero in on gender and race for diversity hiring

Contrary to popular opinion, numerous factors apart from a candidate’s gender and race are taken into account while following diversity hiring plans. While multiple characteristics do make your job a tad bit more tricky, they play a significant role in skyrocketing an organization’s profitability and growth.

Here are the top variables contributing to the diversity of a workforce:

Age
Gender
Race
Ethnicity
Religion
Educational background
Sexual orientation

DO share your diversity policies with candidates transparently

Attracting quality candidates isn’t easy today. It’s vital for recruiters to openly share their diversity recruitment practices and policies that go behind the scenes. Some of the policies that immensely help in talent attraction and retention are:

Recruitment and Selection policy: A detailed description of the steps taken to ensure unbiased recruitment and selection process. Ideally, this policy highlights the transparency and consistency of efforts put in to build a diverse workforce along with the proactive support being available to candidates.

Work-Life policy: It covers parental, adoption, family-friendly leaves, and support for employees who are transitioning.

Dignity at Work policy: It defines the organization’s commitment to ensuring no unwanted behavior. This policy should clearly lay down the formal procedure in case of any misconduct or complaints.

DON’T skip diversity recruitment plans in your employer branding strategy

A major chunk of the workforce considers diversity and inclusion as the primary requirements when choosing the employer to work with. However, claiming that you value diversity and present equal rights to everyone – doesn’t work.

Your commitment and efforts towards diversity hiring and inclusion should be clearly visible to the world, and especially to your audience as an employer. When you actively promote your diversity and inclusion goals, the chance of receiving applications from top talent significantly increases.

Here are some of the activities you can consistently do for the same objective:

Share testimonials from employees representing diverse backgrounds
Ask your team members to post about this on their LinkedIn account
Post thought leadership content around the need for diversity hiring and the challenges surrounding it

DO screen your recruiters to remove unconscious bias internally

This is one of the most under-utilized tips for removing the unconscious bias present in almost everyone. Screening tests help you as a recruiter to divert your focus on the aspects that matter – including the skills, experience, and knowledge of the candidate.

To evaluate your candidates’ skills based on the tasks they will be performing in the job, you need to remove the following biases which are usually noticed in recruitment processes:

Gender bias
Affinity bias
Location-based bias
Educational background bias
Linguistic bias

To prevent your diversity hiring plans from being affected by these unconscious biases, you can add an objective screening test for the entire recruiting team.

DON’T ignore diversity training for your recruiting team

In order to accomplish your diversity recruitment objectives, your complete recruitment team needs to be on the same grounds as you. While screening tests help you assess their current unconscious biases, you now need to guide your team members about diversity recruitment.

Diving a bit deeper, the core aim is to educate them about the different parameters that contribute to the efficiency of diversity hiring. From unconscious biases to diversity policies, results of misconduct, and more – diversity training for your recruiting team should cover it all.

Top 7 Diversity Recruiting Metrics to Measure

If you have been in the talent acquisition space for quite some time now, you would probably know how important it is to measure the right recruitment metrics. If you don’t measure, there’s no scope for improvement. Similarly, for your diversity recruiting initiatives, you need to take care of specific metrics. Here are the top 7 most commonly used and meaningful diversity recruiting metrics:

Diversity-Focused Outreach Activity

First things first, you need to assess how many target candidates is your team reaching out to for each of the open roles. How many underrepresented candidates are responding to the outreach? How many of those are you screening with a phone round?

This metric primarily tells you if your outreach is targeting the right talent, if your message is right, and if you can know in case the process needs to be reworked. Ensure you record the data consistently and analyze it at least once every month to know if your team is reaching out to a diverse talent pool.

Diversity of Hiring Panel

The diversity of your recruitment team – from sourcing experts to interviewers, significantly matters when it comes to effectively hiring diverse talent. The team and especially the interviewing panel should have people of different demographics like age, gender, race, educational background, and skills and experience.

The higher the diversity in your recruitment team, the more effectively you will be able to remove unconscious bias. Additionally, it makes the candidates feel more involved, relatable, and convenient in the interviews.

Diversity of Employees vs Your Talent Pool

To check if you’re hiring enough diverse talent, you need to compare the diversity of applicants to the overall diversity of people you are hiring. If the figures around target demographics vary significantly, it’s a clear indication your recruitment process is biased and needs to be rectified.

As you try to improve this metric and bring both the figures close, keep track of this ratio while continuously hiring candidates. Remember - the core aim is to remove bias and look for ways to do the same for optimizing the diversity of your talent pool.

Recruitment Funnel Conversions

^Conversion rates at each stage of the recruitment funnel tell you the efficiency of your diversity recruitment efforts. To find out if underrepresented candidates are being successfully recruited, conversion rates at various stages are always vital. Here are the metrics that come under this umbrella:

Percentage of unrepresented candidates making it to the phone screen round
Percentage of unrepresented screened candidates successfully reaching the interview rounds
Percentage of unrepresented interviewed candidates qualifying all the stages and getting the offer letter
Finally, the percentage of offered candidates ultimately joining the o

Conversion rates directly tell you if the recruitment funnel is reflecting biases.

Diversity Across All Organizational Levels

From leadership positions to entry-level roles, organizations need to have talent coming from diverse backgrounds at all levels. This is a critical metric to be considered for organizations as it conveys that everyone can learn from people who are underrepresented.

A study by McKinsey showed women of color accounted for only 4% of C-suite executives. To start off with, you have to measure the percentage of employees with different demographics working at various levels and departments of the organization.

DEI employee surveys (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) can help you boost your diversity across various departments and levels.

Source of Hire

Measuring the efficiency of each channel while sourcing and recruiting diverse candidates is another essential step for analyzing and improving diversity recruitment. Choose the top talent sourcing channels like social media, job boards, events, and referrals – and consistently measure the effectiveness of each of them.

The idea is to take data-backed decisions and double down on the channels that work the best for your talent acquisition.

Candidate Experience

In order to truly understand the effectiveness of a recruitment practice or initiative, we should priorly analyze how the candidates are feeling about it. In the case of diversity hiring, candidate experience (CX) is even more vital as we are aiming to serve better, fair, and equal opportunities for all.

Conduct a survey among your candidates asking them both qualitative and quantitative questions. Some examples of the questions you can include in it are:

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On a scale of 1-10, what’s their satisfaction score with the diversity recruitment efforts?
How likely are they to recommend or refer someone to get hired by the organization?
What was the most delightful part of their recruitment journey?
What according to them can be improved in order to hire better and more diverse talent?

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.

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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.

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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.