If you agree that a company is only as good as its employees, you would’ve noticed that monolithic employees easily regurgitate ideas.
A homogenous workforce—employees from the same religious, cultural, or ethnic background— tend to deploy the same old ideas when tackling new challenges. As a result, they don’t see the need for new perspectives and invest in making regurgitated ideas the benchmark for keeping up with evolving industry trends.
Indeed, a homogenous workforce has been vital to shaping modern-day companies. However, as trends change and the recruitment industry evolves, it’s safe to say diverse workforces are the next frontier for founders and CEOs who want to scale their company at lightning speed.
What makes up a diverse workforce?
Diverse workforces are comprised of men and women of different cultures, ages, regions, religions, sexual orientations, and races.
These workforces support hires from diverse talent pools, put people first, and promote an inclusive working environment that makes existing employees feel valued and loved. A diverse workforce helps companies cultivate true equality in the workplace while upholding prized social responsibility viewpoints. Leaving the moral reasons aside, CEOs have multiple compelling business reasons to recruit for diversity. This brings us to the importance and the latest trend of ‘diversity recruitment’.
Making people with diverse backgrounds, age, race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and other personal traits, work together, means you are ready to create a universal workplace where employees can fluidly think past the mundane, unattractive work ethics and thrive on good vibes.
This implies that you’ll need a hiring process free from biases for or against any individual or group of candidates; welcome and respect “outside the box” ideas, entertain multiple perspectives, and give every candidate equal opportunity at work.
What is Diversity Recruitment?
Diversity recruitment is the hiring strategy that companies use to recruit top talents regardless of inherent {race, gender, age, demographics, and other characteristics natural to a candidate’s existence} or acquired attributes {education, experience, values, skills, knowledge, and other characteristics we develop over time}.
This recruitment strategy promotes a knowledgeable team-building process; as it ensures recruiters don’t place personal preferences ahead of talent and attracts people from different walks of life.
Here are some of the subtle changes that your recruitment team can pursue to hire a diverse workforce effectively:
- Your Talent Sourcers can extend their search for the right candidate across local and international talent pools, within and outside your industry.
- Hiring Managers should introduce recruitment strategies free of personal beliefs or values.
- Recruiters can undergo bias training programs. And in some cases, you can adopt blind profiling and interviewing methods.
- Recruitment coordinators should create inclusive job ads free of stereotypically gendered words.
Now that you know what makes up a diverse workforce and how to create one; let’s look at some benefits of diversity recruitment.
Benefits of Diversity Recruitment
- Maximizes productivity, creativity, and loyalty of employees
A creative workforce keeps you leading industry trends. Productive employees attract a recurring increase in monthly revenues, and loyal employees cement your company’s foundation for new hires to feel included, represented and valued.
Now, while most companies struggle to keep up with everyday productivity and feel like they’ve to tout the employee’s one-upmanship suit to become creative, a diverse workforce does things differently.
Diverse companies stay ahead of the curve because they work with individuals with a broad range of skills and expertise, and each employee brings a unique viewpoint to the table, which increases the potential for productivity and allows the great chances to become feasible solutions of the possible problems.
Diversity – recruitment – strategy allows your talent hunters to source for a truckload of candidates that cherish and uphold the same ideals as you and are willing to go the extra mile to ensure company values are placed ahead of personal beliefs.
- Promotes freedom to cultivate new ideas
Ideas are the lifeblood of every company, from the expected monthly revenue to the tactics deployed to solve problems and drive innovation; sustainable ideas stroke a good frame of mind. You will often find that many employees are not able to propose fresh insight and new ideas.
Simple reason; they are used to working with familiar strategies and thinking patterns and are typically too scared or clueless to think outside the box.
A diversity – recruitment – strategy can help make the workforce look like the society without prejudice. That means diverse companies readily hire individuals who are not stressed, dealing with ”echo chambers’ or confirmation bias
– thereby allowing potential employees to share and come to terms with diverse perspectives, giving everyone the freedom to cultivate new ideas and blacklist identical thinking patterns.
- A sure-fire way to bring in a nice variety of employees
The internet made the world a global village. A few deliberate clicks on your smartphone can connect you with almost anyone. And with the pandemic gradually forcing the switch to a hybrid workforce, there is no better time to maximize the power of the internet than now.
With that in mind,
- Why limit the hiring process to specific demographics or personalities?
- Why stunt your company’s growth by investing in candidate sourcing methods that don’t guarantee a boatload of top talents?
- Why neglect the productive influence of an unbiased workforce?
Well, maybe you don’t have a solid diversity – recruitment – strategy.
One of the many benefits of diversity recruitment is that it allows employers to source candidates globally. This hiring strategy supports smooth interactions and offers recruiters a larger candidate pool to choose from—a sure way to bring in a pleasant variety of employees.
- Minimizes stereotypical bias
It’s easy to attribute someone’s particular behaviors, personality, or color to existing, unfounded stereotypes while attributing your own similar behaviors, personality, or color to external factors.
While stereotypes, in most cases, are projections you subconsciously or unknowingly create, the need to eradicate such bias from the everyday workforce is crucial to the rise of far-reaching thought leaders.
Profound diversity recruitment strategies are deeply rooted in equity and oneness. So even though you can’t eradicate stereotypical beliefs from the workplace, diverse strategies leave room for genuine acceptance and understanding coming into play.
- Fosters self-directed learning and empowers thought leaders
Thought leaders influence industry growth. They offer original ideas or strong opinions capable of shaping or reshaping a market segment. These folks possess a distinct voice to which, industry giants and SMEs would gladly pay to listen to.
But the fact remains, while CEOs make up a good portion of the thought leadership vogue, you will find a handful of department heads and regular employees intuitively leading thought leadership discussions on social media. Now, imagine that such folks are working for you; growth possibilities become limitless, right?
One of the many benefits of diversity recruitment is that it empowers thought leaders.
In an environment where the hiring process is open, candidates that want to excel must constantly challenge themselves, foster self-directed learning habits, and rise to new ideas.
Meaning, if you can cultivate a diverse workplace culture that empowers employees to achieve better outcomes, your recruitment ads will attract multiple resumes from men and women with knowledgeable insight to drive industry trends. Just so you know, companies with diverse hires are 1.7 times more likely to be thought leaders in their market segments.
Conclusion
Indeed, cultivating a diverse working environment and deploying sustainable diversity recruitment strategies is tricky and can become overwhelming, especially if you don’t have an experienced recruitment team.
But hey! If you can place diversity at the heart and soul of your company culture and promote diverse values, top talents will easily find your job ads appealing.
If you are looking to up your diversity – recruitment – activity or want to make a swift switch to this hiring strategy; EliteRecruitments is a staffing and recruitment agency traversing multiple domains and offering a comprehensive suite of recruitment services.
Our experts are undisputed champions in hiring top talents—if you ever need an employer/employee-centric diversity – recruitment – strategy to help in candidate sourcing, hiring the right fit, or onboarding top talents, we are a click away; let’s talk.
