Image Credit – philmckinney.com
Couple of years ago, we were doing a project with a large MNC Strategy Consulting firm on revamping their hiring strategies. While they maintained that they have diverse team with 30% women in their orgnisations, our report suggested to look deep. While the demographics parameters on gender & culture suggested that the team was diverse, but all of them were wearing penguin suits of similar backgrounds. They have been traditionally hiring from select Top Business schools with engineers as preferred background. This also meant that their attrition rate was high as this talent was on high demand constantly and created a challenge during promotion matrix.
As they say, there is no quick fix to diversity hiring. Not only is diversity recruitment the right thing to do, it is the smart thing to do. Hiring a diverse team is crucial to an organisation’s sustainability for the following reasons:
- Having diverse staff enables us to understand and meet the needs of people from diverse perspectives, and creates an atmosphere that supports positive relationships and communications.
- Different backgrounds and perspectives lead to a variety of ideas, knowledge, and ways of doing things.
- By building a reputation for valuing differences, we can attract talented employees who know that we will appreciate and utilize the skills, backgrounds, perceptions, and knowledge they bring to the table. This leads to greater commitment and higher productivity.
- By making diversity recruitment deliberate, we can bring in employees who might not otherwise consider your organisation, and who can enrich and broaden our community.
But I believe the diversity has little to do with appearance, but gender and race is a shortcut to noticing the problem and visible variety actually affects behavior.
Hence before we embark on hiring diverse team, one needs to ascertain following factors:
- Understands what constitutes diversity.
- Recognize your own biases – conscious & unconscious
- Evaluate the diversity of your current team & find the missing link
The next step is to work with Recruitment team in HR & also Communications team. One should work on attracting diverse talent which means to reaching out to diverse networks, branding the job & the company & promote the diverse culture of the organization. Following are the 6 steps which hiring teams could follow:
- Create compelling jobs. The title and the first two lines of the job description determine whether it will be read, so make sure that these first two lines create a buzz. Focus on the possibilities — what the person will do, learn, and become — not the requirements.
- Brand the job. Somewhere in the job description, tie the job to the company vision, its mission, a big project, or some important strategy. This makes the job bigger than itself. “
- Culturally brand the job. Do you really have a culture that thrives on diversity, or are you just meeting some corporate objective? You need to capture diversity directly into the job.
- Reach out and find your candidate. If your target audience won’t come to you, you’d better go out to them. This means you must leverage your employee referral program, and creatively use tools like LinkedIn, as well as headhunters focusing on diversity hiring. names to get more names.
- Stay involved. Make your marketing a process, not an event. The basic theme: Don’t just show up for some recruiting event. Instead, you need to promote, sponsor, be involved, and be committed — every month, every year, and not just a few days here and there.
- Conduct a great on-boarding experience and get more referrals. This is how you make the process of hiring diversity and other high-demand candidates self-sustaining.
Hiring top people, including diversity candidates or any top person in high demand, is about much more than just finding names. It’s a process which needs to work like a clockwork and it will work every time!
