HR’s Guide to Building a Diversity Recruiting Strategy
Breaking Barriers, No Politics Allowed: Diversity recruiting can transcend political rhetoric, focusing on eliminating biases based on background, beliefs, or culture to foster a more representative talent pool.
Inherent vs. Acquired Diversity: Inherent diversity includes traits like race and gender, while acquired diversity encompasses education and skills. Both are essential for a well-rounded team.
The Secret Sauce: Diverse Teams Outperform: Research consistently shows that diverse teams achieve better performance, making a compelling business case for integrating diversity into your hiring strategy.
More Perspectives, Stronger Products: Diverse hiring isn't just good PR; it ensures each new hire brings unique insights, enhancing the competitiveness, resilience, and usability of your products.
Diversity recruiting strategies are currently wrapped up in the rest of the conversation around diversity, which is often reductive and fueled with political rhetoric.
But just because these efforts have become a lightning rod for negativity and criticism doesn't mean you shouldn't go beyond ticking a box or meeting quotas.
There are variety of ways you can still meet the goals of diversity recruiting strategy, be it through taking advantage of the technology at work in your recruiting software or diversity recruiting software, or refining your hiring practices to ensure you're finding the right candidates no matter what they look like or where they come from.
So, without further ado, here are my areas of focus to help you create a recruiting strategy that will give you access to a wider candidate pool and help you create a well-rounded team.
What is Diversity Recruiting?
Diversity recruiting involves hiring candidates through a process that eliminates biases based on background, beliefs, or culture. It ensures that no individual or group is favored or disadvantaged because of their identity.
Workplace diversity means that your team should mirror the broader society, comprising people from various backgrounds and experiences. This includes diversity in gender, experience, socioeconomic status, race, religion, sexual orientation, and more.
Diversity can be categorized into two types:
- Inherent diversity relates to demographic traits such as race, gender, age, and health—characteristics intrinsic to a person.
- Acquired diversity includes aspects like education, experience, values, skills, and knowledge, which are developed over time.
The aim of diversity recruiting is to create a talent pool that better represents the surrounding society. While it remains an approach focused on finding the best candidate, it also strives to give all applicants, regardless of background, an equal opportunity.
Why a recruiting diversity strategy matters
While creating a hiring plan is complicated enough without accounting for diversity, doing so has significant benefits for the business.
Study after study shows that diverse teams perform better (like these ones here, here, and here).
But let's unpack some of the other benefits of an effective approach to diversity recruiting.
Better products and services
While recruiting for diversity can be a part of your employer brand, it isn’t just an exercise in making your company look good by paying lip service to being diverse.
Every hire is an opportunity to add a new perspective that will enrich your team. It will require time, it will require commitment but, in the end, it will make your product more competitive, resilient, and widely usable.
An example of this lacking was when the team at YouTube couldn’t figure out why 10% of videos were upside down when vertical.
Turns out it was because some people shot videos left-handed horizontally and the app later adjusted them for vertical but upside-down. Of course, I’m not saying they should have looked for a left-handed person specifically, but it’s useful to illustrate how important it is to consider different perspectives.
A more concerning example was when facial recognition AI was not recognizing accurately the faces of black women. This is deployed AI, used by the police and governments a few years ago. Very scary that no one in the testing stage thought that this was something to train the AI on.
Recently, I joined a new company and the research team was talking about a project in my native Bulgaria. It was very interesting that, while I knew little about the research, I was able to contribute a lot to further their understanding of the cultural context they were lacking and improve the accuracy of the research.
While we can’t hire people from every nationality, it shows that our differences and unique factors can be your organization’s strength.
Access to more candidates
A focus on diversity will also help you to expand your pool of available candidates.
For example, Dell’s Neurodiversity hiring program took a targeted look at where and how they could employ underemployed talent on the neurodiversity spectrum in different positions.
"It’s a great way to give a career to talent who traditionally find it difficult to find work. Inclusive recruiting software can further widen your talent pool. And, of course, Dell gets to benefit from that talent and fill their positions!
All this will, of course, impact the bottom line of your organization—a major way to “sell” commitment to diverse and inclusive hiring for those who do not understand that it’s also the right thing to do.
4 Methods to ensure diversity in recruiting
1. Diversity in sourcing—expanding the talent pool
Increasing the diversity at the top of the pipeline is where most of your focus should be.
Ultimately, you still need to hire top talent with the right skill set and experience, so you need to make sure you cast a wide net initially. Here’s what to focus on here.
Allow time for sourcing
You need to dedicate time to sourcing candidates from diverse backgrounds.
For example, recently I posted a software engineering job for which all applicants for a role are male. I then took some time to reach out to some female candidates and balance out the pipeline.
There are some that will see this as "positive discrimination", however, I am not hiring based solely on characteristics, rather I am simply ensuring that our role gets highlighted to a wider audience.
Another useful method is slightly decelerating the process.
When I was helping to scale rapidly at Twitch, I specifically asked hiring managers to take two weeks instead of one to shortlist candidates.
This ensured that we had more time to source and I also saw that, in the second week, the role gets a lot more diverse candidates applying.
When I asked those candidates why they applied at the time they did, they said that they took their time looking into the company as they were concerned that it was a bit of a ‘boys club’ (as a lot of companies around gaming can be).
Inclusive job adverts
Your job advert is likely how most candidates will first come across your organization and an open role.
In addition to making sure the advert is both informative and engaging, you should make sure it’s not excluding diverse talent, either explicitly or implicitly.
Something I see a lot in job descriptions is words have an implied bias associating them with a specific gender e.g. ‘he/she” or “4-man team”.
Similarly, studies show that women are less likely to apply for roles that overemphasize qualities like dominance and competitiveness, and men for roles that overemphasize supporting and understanding.
Is this fair? No, it should be that everyone feels comfortable applying for any role, but this is tied to gender norms picked up during childhood that will take at least several generations to uproot.
In the meantime, there are paid and free tools to reduce gendered keywords.
Personally, I always use a couple of free tools because they don’t seem to agree on the same text (e.g., Gender Decoder: find subtle bias in job ads (katmatfield.com) and Gender Bias Decoder | Totaljobs think the same text is either feminine coded or the opposite).
After a while, you will understand which are the really loaded words and be mindful of their overuse.
Reduce requirements
In my article on how to write zinger job descriptions, I focus on ways to remove generic job requirements like “communication skills” and, if necessary, replace them with something more meaningful like “the ability to communicate across functions and influence them”.
Another added benefit is that this also helps reduce gender bias as multiple studies show that women tend to not apply unless they meet 100% of the requirements.
The more bullet points you add the more likely you are to exclude people who would be otherwise qualified but don’t see themselves as so.
2. An accessible application process
Something that’s not often talked about is the accessibility of application processes.
Some can be incredibly exclusive to people from different backgrounds or neurodivergent people e.g., overly long written interviews and psychometrics tests (which already suffer from questionable validity).
These can exclude people with disabilities from participating in the process altogether, even though they can perform their roles perfectly well and prove detrimental to your recruitment marketing efforts.
The application process should be reviewed to ensure that only things that are necessary for the role are included.
For example, I once gave candidates the option to apply with either their LinkedIn profile, their resume, or a set of questions that I had designed to give me enough of an overview to make a decision in my screening.
I did this because there is a generation of workers, and people from certain countries, that have never written a CV in their lives but are amazing workers.
3. Challenge referrals
Referrals are a great way to engage your current employees and get applicants who’re more likely to be the right fit for the role because current employees have a deeper understanding of what you need.
However, when I ask for referrals, I always make sure to add an extra twist to the question.
I always ask “Whose voice have we not heard in your team? How can we get them here to contribute?” because, often, it makes people think about things a bit differently.
The last time I asked a new team this question I was met with confused looks. The team I posed the question to had experienced a pretty major oversight in the product strategy, which led them to realize that they'd worked together for so long, and the manager had hired so many people just like himself, that they were falling victim to groupthink.
Immediately, they were out there talking to their network and I was getting referrals for candidates they would have never thought of before I asked the question.
Tip: Use referral software to automate the referral process and make it easier for folks to refer qualified candidates for open positions within the company.
4. Removing bias from interviewing
Now that you’ve increased diversity at the top of the funnel, you have to ensure that the interview process is thought of inclusively.
This is where we go from just thinking about diversity to thinking about inclusion as part of the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) acronym.
Focus on skills and experience
I've also written an article about interviewing for insight, in which I speak about remaining hyper-focused on skills and experience to ensure you get what you really need from a candidate.
In another about reducing bias, I talk about the importance of structured interviewing and the relevance of the questions you’re asking to the role.
A checklist for structured interviewing around skills:
- Is the question relevant to the skillset we require?
- Do you ask the same questions (roughly) of everyone?
- Do your questions delve deep enough into the candidate’s expertise to give you a clear indication of their knowledge?
Asking people about a uniquely identifying characteristic such as their gender, origin, orientation, or race should be avoided as it is irrelevant to the role you’re hiring for.
For example, I have been asked at least on a few occasions where I am from. For context I am from Bulgaria, which is in Eastern Europe, and in the UK there was a lot of negative sentiment for years around people from Eastern Europe.
That meant that a lot of times people were not able to hide their negative thoughts towards my origin (even the mildest reaction).
The most severe comment I had was that I "probably won’t make it in law”, as most of the women where I am from do manual work anyway so “Why law?”. This was said to me while I was a law student by a prominent lawyer I was having lunch with the discuss my career options.
Perhaps some of those people asking were genuinely curious, or perhaps the lawyer was challenging me to see what my motivations and drive were, but the main takeaway here is to focus on assessing the candidate for the position based on their skills, expertise, and knowledge and avoid questions that are too personal.
Biases can be easy to fall into and difficult to get out of, whether it be about ethnic origin or the fact that, despite so many brilliant women in the workforce, brilliance is still seen as a male trait.
Avoid the cultural fit trap
Down the years, I’ve seen the cultural question applied very myopically—basically a shortcut of “Can I see myself at a bar with this person?” But we’re not hiring new friends or drinking buddies.
The culture fit you should be looking for is a set of values and behaviors towards work i.e., “Can I deliver a project with this person?”
Another distinction that I always talk to my candidates and hiring managers about is that you should not be looking for either introverts or extroverts—that is not going to indicate performance in any role.
However, you should look for the actual behavior towards work that you need e.g. a team player.
Diverse interviewers
Lastly, make sure that candidates get interviewed by a diverse hiring team. Sometimes you may need to introduce someone cross-functional in your team if you have no one diverse who can support that.
This is important to a) make sure that any diverse candidate sees that they won’t be a tick box hire and b) catch out candidates who will not fit into a diverse environment.
I’ve successfully caught out candidates whose sexism couldn’t even be contained for the course of the interview process!
You read that right, a candidate once treated me like an idiot and then spoke incredibly condescendingly to the female interviewer who was going to be a peer.
Partnering with groups
While this may help you with sourcing, I want to make sure I highlight this separately as special groups of people like “Women in Tech” should not be just buckets of candidates for you.
You should be aiming to have a true partnership with these groups so that you show your true commitment—put your time and money where your mouth is!
Personally, I connected with groups like Women Who Go and Queer Engineer (LGBTQ) and volunteered my time.
I used to review CVs and help with interview prep. Make sure that your hiring managers and teams from each of the disciplines you are recruiting for (sales, tech, product, marketing, etc.) find a space where they can connect with diverse groups and give back to the community.
Bias training
You may create many processes and guardrails, but people’s unconscious biases can still kick in during an interview process.
I wrote a fairly lengthy article covering bias in hiring, but make sure that you speak with experts in the area who can run some bias training.
It may seem like another “HR seminar”, but well-run bias training can be eye-opening, unexpectedly engaging, and even cathartic. I was brought to tears in one!
To ensure your recruiting efforts remain compliant with local laws and regulations, it's worth the time to lead a training.
Other initiatives
Here are a few more initiatives that can be an effective part of your recruiting diversity strategy.
- Apprenticeships. Probably one of the best ways to tackle underrepresentation based on ethnic background, socioeconomic status, and even gender. Also, apprenticeship builds up your future candidate pool.
- Internships. Internship programs can help build diverse talent pipelines, especially when designed to target underrepresented groups in certain industries or roles.
- Returnships. A great way by which parents, carers, or those who have had to take an extended career break can get back into a career.
- Remote/flexible work. Companies with flexible work are more likely to find more diverse candidates (e.g. working mums and people with disabilities).
- Part-time/Job share. Think about whether your role can be offered part-time or to two people who can share it.
- Partnering with groups to offer jobs, work experience, and shadowing.
- Outsource to an RPO company that specializes in reaching more diverse candidate pools.
Post hiring
Increasing the diversity and representation of hires is not a one-and-done act. Don’t forget that post-hire, you'll need to make sure that you help your new hires feel welcome.
You do not want to become the manager who struggles with the retention of diverse talent, so make sure you’re at least proactive in creating an inclusive working environment.
Speak to your team members about their experiences and, if you’re unsure about anything, try to get support from human resources.
I remember in my first job I was moved to a team of only guys. A few days later, I found out that they had a list ranking the bodies of female colleagues. They were so used to discussing the topic that they didn’t realise it was not appropriate at all, let alone with me around.
All of a sudden, one realised I was in the room and said “No worries Mariya, you are not on it, you are one of us”…. as if that was the problem.
I pulled them all into a room and gave them the lesson of a lifetime that no HR would have delivered (I wasn’t HR at the time).
An extreme example, perhaps, but illustrative of the point.
Wait, no metrics or KPIs?
As you may have noticed, this article doesn’t talk about KPIs or metrics. This is because workforce diversity should be a task for everyone, not just a group that owns the target.
You should keep track and see if participation from underrepresented groups increases in your hiring process, but creating steep targets or worse a “diversity hiring team” can make people feel tokenised and encourage the hiring teams to try to game the system just to tick a box.
Almost every female engineer I know has been reached out to by a “diversity sourcer”, and they actually refuse to reply on principle because they’re engineers first and shouldn’t be approached based solely on their gender.
This does not mean you should give up, but, if anything, demonstrate your dedication more and make sure that, as much as possible, people understand the need for their participation too. Discrimination still exists everywhere, so our work is not done!
