Charles Hipps tells us why recruiting for diversity benefits everyone.

Every organisation understands this powerful statement: ‘A more diverse workforce has been proven to be one that will increase organisational performance by providing multiple, fresh perspectives leading to innovation and better risk management. The improvement that diverse workforces bring to business delivery is linked to the diversification of the marketplace.’

But for many this is more difficult than it perhaps ought to be! More often than not, recruiting teams are doing what they’ve always done, seeing the same candidates and visiting the same events. Spending budgets are always categorised to suit those practices, sometimes introducing a new avenue, but lacking real understanding of what those additions are bringing to the table.

Meanwhile, those traditional, long-standing programs aren’t getting the audits required to understand actual return on investment.

It’s all in line with the adage, “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.”

If a culture doesn’t include or develop diverse employees, then you won’t be able to sustain a diverse workforce in the long term.

Yet, for more diversity, organisations need the ability to see underlying potential or lack thereof. Does that university’s career fair actually bring in the right applicants or are you wasting precious resources on it every year? How about those niche job boards? Is your targeted talent finding your job posting and are they actually fitting your needs?

Diversity & inclusion can’t just be done on a whim. You need to set aspirational goals based on your historic data and then start to construct a customised event/workshop that meets these goals. Your previous successes will help to identify partners or professional groups who can also help build credibility alongside representative members of your existing team.

If a culture doesn’t include or develop diverse employees, then you won’t be able to sustain a diverse workforce in the long term.

So, devoting attention and management to these audiences can only serve to help strengthen engagement with diverse communities and help to realise practical, actionable items for the better of your organisation in future hiring campaigns.

This introduces disadvantages for candidates whose upbringing and background means they are not aware of ‘opaque’ city dress codes – for example, some senior investment bankers still consider it unacceptable for men to wear brown shoes with a business suit

Top recruiters might receive over 150,000 applications a year and rising from a mixture of core and non-core schools and not have time to sift fairly. Predictive analytics can ease this pressure. Used well, it will sift and flag to you, candidates that have all the key indicators of success you’re looking for, but that didn’t go to a target school – i.e. schools that are not on anyone’s core schools lists but do have exceptional talent.

It’s important to look back at MI and analytics to learn what’s worked well and what hasn’t. It takes time to make a change and see results quickly, but the business case for diversity is too strong to ignore so don’t let that deter you.

Good intelligence will mean that you can see react if certain initiatives are not changing the ratio of diversity applications in your favour and find new ways of making sure that talent remains invested in your business.

Recruiters can achieve benefits from measuring participation such as:

• Providing stronger evidence and recordkeeping to support hiring decisions
• Identifying & quantifying any historic bias to reduce bias in future decision making
• Reducing the economic bias to exclude

Events are just the first step to securing talent and embedding diversity in your organisation. Efforts need to be made to keep interested candidates warm thereafter. Engagement along the way is critical to taking the positive sentiments captured at an event and making sure the most promising candidates go on to become recruits.

Intuitively recruiters can use CRM tools to make sure they are flagging the best of the best from the moment they register to an event. From there, it is important to keep emphasising your EVP in all your communications including on the application system where candidates check-in to find the progress of their application.

Signposting content without making interested candidates have to navigate back to the Careers pages is one easy way of doing this. These simple mechanisms can continue to celebrate diversity & inclusion without being stereotypical or unavailable to applicants who do not fall into either category.

Furthermore, recruiters can look at using talent pools to capture speculative applications when you do not have an open campaign and then issue invites to events. This same technology can be used to keep unsuccessful candidates warm after being told their application has been over so if a future position opens up, they can be put forward for a role with no new information needed to be captured.

Hiring a diverse team can be a profitable decision, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to do. Embedding technology into your strategies allows recruiters to understand what’s working and what can be adjusted for better results. This session will help you understand just where to begin to set you on the right path to handling this sensitive area well.

About the author

Charles Hipps is CEO and founder of Oleeo.