How to Hire Diverse Employees: Best Diverse Hiring Practices

When you’re looking for the hands-down best candidate to fill a position, the last thing you want is for conscious or unconscious assumptions to interfere with the selection process. Diversity hiring seeks to reduce explicit and implicit biases that commonly affect recruitment and hiring. 

Contrary to persistent misconceptions, diversity hiring should not aim to increase diversity merely for diversity’s sake. Instead, the ultimate goal of diversity hiring is to allow companies to hire the best possible candidate, regardless of their age, gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, or disability.

Decision-makers achieve this by examining and adapting organizations’ channels and methods to recruit, screen, and shortlist candidates. 

Recruitment policies and practices should counteract potential biases and influences that harm diversity and inclusion efforts. That way, organizations can acquire talent from a wider candidate pool, thus increasing their odds of finding the ideal person for the job. 

The Benefits of a Diverse Team

The business case for diversity is well-documented and compelling. 

Organizations with top-quartile ethnic and racial representation outpaced their less diverse peers’ profitability by 36%. And the likelihood of companies with the highest number of female executives outperforming competitors with ten or fewer female executives is a staggering 48%. 

Beyond these benefits, organizations with inclusive cultures and diverse teams can also expect:

• Wider variety of perspectives

• Enhanced creativity and innovation

• Improved problem-solving

• Better decision-making

• Higher profits

• More engaged employees

• Better employee retention

• Better company reputation

Best Diverse Hiring Practices for Building a High-Performing Team

If your organization is ready to get serious about boosting performance, creativity, and innovation by improving workplace diversity, consider implementing these key diversity and inclusivity practices in your hiring process. 

Define Diversity and Inclusion as a Company

Diversity and inclusivity have a third component often left out of the discussion- intersectionality. Intersectionality seeks to acknowledge the various lived experiences of all minorities and marginalized peoples. 

The first wave of diversity and inclusivity primarily focused on racial, gender, and sexual orientation discrimination. Now, companies are expanding their diversity and inclusivity efforts to include other marginalized members of society. These demographics include individuals who are neurodivergent, disabled, from non-traditional backgrounds, differing socio-economic statuses, and so on.

Define what diversity and inclusivity means for your organization. Then, you can fine-tune your hiring process, broaden your candidate pool to include more highly qualified candidates, and increase D&I efforts’ effectiveness. 

Eliminate Hiring Bias

Implicit or unconscious biases can wreak havoc on your hiring process. Fortunately, there are a variety of steps organizations can take to minimize and eliminate biases in recruiting and hiring processes.

Implicit bias training can help hiring managers recognize and check personal biases at the door, but it works best accompanied by additional anti-bias strategies. For example, standardized interview processes, a diverse hiring panel, and inclusive job descriptions can all enhance the effect of implicit bias training and improve workplace diversity. 

Create Standardized Interview Processes

Sometimes systemic issues call for systemic solutions. A standardized hiring process that screens all applicants equally helps hiring managers and panels reduce the impact of potential biases that may slip through the cracks during interviews. 

Informal interview processes invite subjective evaluations that are often more related to how well candidates click with hiring managers than performance or qualifications. Conversely, standardized processes empower companies to make objective hiring decisions that align with the team and the company’s overarching mission.

Use Neutral Language in Job Descriptions 

Unconscious biases can slip into job descriptions through coded language if organizations aren’t careful.

For example, including desired characteristics like “energetic” may deter older and more experienced candidates. Additionally, terms traditionally associated with masculinity, such as “competitive,” can turn off qualified female candidates, limiting your candidate pool from the very start. 

To avoid coded language that may favor one group over another, focus on detailing responsibilities and desired qualifications in your job descriptions. Also, go easy on personality requests in job descriptions. Trust your hiring professionals to find candidates that will mesh well with your team and workflow during the interview process.

Avoid Going Overboard With ‘Nice-to-Haves’

Did you know men routinely apply to jobs where they only meet about 60% of the listed requirements, while women will hold off on applying unless they meet 100% of requirements?

This is just one example of how different classes' professional behaviors can affect the success of diversity and inclusion efforts. Eliminate this particular disparity by focusing job descriptions on the relevant requirements and responsibilities of the role in question, rather than superfluous or optimistic ‘nice-to-haves.’ These particulars may ultimately limit your candidate pool and decrease your odds of onboarding the ideal candidate for your organization. 

Introduce Anonymity to Your Hiring Process 

Women who anonymize their resumes nearly double the number of interviews they land. 

That’s because information on resumes like names, addresses, and colleges can cause hiring professionals to unintentionally generate preconceptions about candidates based on perceived race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender, or sexuality. 

For more proof that anonymity is crucial for an equitable hiring process, consider how racial minorities who anonymized resumes by scrubbing their resume of any race-related information experienced significantly improved response rates and interviews. 

Black applicants saw a 15% increase in the number of interview responses after removing references to their race, such as HBCU attendance or historically black fraternal affiliation. Asian-American applicants also saw an improvement of roughly 10% in hiring callbacks after anonymizing their resumes.

By anonymizing all resumes as a standard hiring practice, organizations can prevent personal and implicit biases from affecting their ability to acquire talented professionals from diverse backgrounds.

Take Advantage of Recruitment Technology to Boost Diversity

Modern recruitment technologies like PerceptionPredict’s Performance Fingerprints can help organizations revolutionize their diversity and inclusion hiring results overnight. 

PerceptionPredict harnesses the power of predictive analytics, an advanced branch of AI that involves machine learning, complex statistical algorithms, and cutting-edge computational modeling. Our decision support platform generates data-driven candidate profiles that eliminate human biases, introducing an unforeseen level of objectivity to the hiring process.

Our Performance Fingerprints are strictly performance and productivity-based. They omit unnecessary information that could compromise the optimal hiring decisions that maximize performance and support your D&I mission.

To learn more about how our Performance Fingerprints improve diversity, equity, and inclusion, book a demo with one of our experts.