Workplace Diversity Through Recruitment – A Step-By-Step Guide

Building & maintaining a diverse workforce has a myriad of benefits. For starters, it shows that you have an inclusive and open company culture that doesn’t support prejudices or bias. Secondly, diversity will improve creativity & innovation within your company.

Hiring people from different walks of life and ethnic backgrounds creates an environment where unique experiences are considered a strength in the workforce, not a weakness. This inclusive environment ultimately translates to a better and bigger pool of knowledge to utilize. 

If you’ve already taken steps to create a diverse workplace, kudos! However, every company can make improvements when it comes to diversity and supporting an inclusive culture in their workforce.
The best way to get started is through purposeful recruitment. It’s essential that your recruiters have a growth mindset & are searching for potential candidates in diverse pools. If not, your business is in danger of missing out on fresh, untapped talent!

What is Workplace Diversity 

Workplace Diversity is an ideal work environment in which people from differing backgrounds can collaborate, innovate & feel free to be their authentic selves. It’s more than a concept, & has clearly been proven to produce better results than a homogenous workforce. Businesses therefore are encouraged to move forward into today’s best practices for recruitment by checking both their unconscious and conscious bias. Often the common biases are gender, or race. These are inarguably significant when looking at diversity, but they don’t encompass the entire problem. 

Inherent diversity often includes demographic characteristics like race, sex, and age. However, acquired diversity, on the other hand, include factors such as education, experience, values, knowledge, and skills.

Are There Really Benefits to Having Diversity?

As stated before, it’s been proven! Forbes has concluded that a diverse workspace directly correlates to internal innovation and business growth. Not only that, but there is statistical proof to back up this claim. A study of more than 500 companies and organizations concluded that every 1% addition to racial and gender diversity meant a 3% to 9% increase in sales revenue.

These results are no surprise. Having a diverse set of people from various backgrounds in your organization means you’ve got more experiences to call upon, people who are accustomed to different situations, have unique skills and can provide fresh ideas.

How Can You Increase Diversity?

To increase diversity, you need to look differently, not harder. 

First, you need to start searching for diverse talent in diverse places. Look into communities that are virtually untapped instead of going to the same old job fairs or university campuses. 

Second, craft your job posting strategically.

Avoid using strong, domineering words, and try to keep the post as neutral as possible. On the same note, you should ensure your policies are inclusive & equitable. For example, ask yourself: does our dress-code policy marginalize a specific group of people? If the answer is yes, consider what that could mean for your workplace environment. 

Third, it’s beneficial to examine your working policy to determine what can and can’t be adjusted. For example, most people want to avoid a huge commute to work each day. Is it possible for them to work from home sometimes? 

This is the sort of thing you can think about ahead of time & establish in your recruiting strategy. Having a more flexible working policy in place gives your employees a chance to implement the proper work-life balance, and therefore tends to be the most attractive attribute to a job posting.

Want to increase diversity in your workplace? Contact re:work for more information!