How to Encourage Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in Your Hiring Process
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives are an essential component to creating a strong workplace. These practices ensure that your organization is able to find the best person for your team by eliminating common barriers to qualified and capable talent of different ethnicities, genders, ages, abilities, socioeconomic statuses, religions, and beliefs. This not only widens your talent pool but increases the caliber of talent available to you.
These initiatives acknowledge that people who do not fall into the majority often come from different backgrounds and experiences that may limit their opportunities due to biases, discrimination, and/or limited access. Including individuals from these different backgrounds and experiences into your workforce offers you a wide variety of perspectives that lead to more creativity, innovation, and problem solving, increasing the strength and productivity of the organization. In order to achieve a diverse workplace, organizations must put into place programs and policies that ensure fairness and inclusivity in their hiring practices.
Here’s a few ways to foster DEI in recruitment and hiring:
Job Descriptions
Avoid language with gendered connotations such as competitive, aggressive, nurturing, and cooperative. Instead, focus on essential skills and experiences. Taking a skills based approach to finding talent increases the diversity of your talent pool.
Including arbitrary qualifications often excludes people from different backgrounds as they often have had to gain experience and skills through alternative methods such as nontraditional education.
Interview Process
Lead with curiosity rather than assumption. Interviews should be used as an opportunity to validate experience and skills as well as an opportunity to get to know the candidate. Use open ended questions that will provide you with more information and context rather than asking close ended questions that eliminate the opportunity to learn more. Having a set of standardized questions is also helpful for interviewers and makes sure that all candidates are evaluated and assessed to the same degree. Being able to compare the answers of different candidates to these questions increases objectivity and decreases individual bias in the interview process.
Training
Educating hiring managers and recruiters on unconscious biases and how they can affect hiring decisions will create a fair interview process for all candidates. As well, consider training for your hiring team to help them acknowledge alternative education, backgrounds, and cultures when evaluating candidates.
Look For “Culture Adds”
Avoid looking for “culture fits” when hiring. Culture fits increases the likelihood of your company hiring people with similar backgrounds, races, genders, experiences, and education offering you limited perspectives and experiences. Hiring “culture adds” will increase your DEI, by building your team with people that will contribute to and advance your workplace culture.
Diversity Sourcing Strategies
Actively connect with diverse talent pools and attend networking events with people from different backgrounds such as women in technology, newcomers, indigenous communities, neurodiverse groups, etc.
Ditch the Resume with DNA*
Resumes increase the opportunity for bias when sourcing and assessing candidates. A candidate's name at the top of the resume can trigger unconscious biases regarding gender, ethnicity, culture, and background. Dates provided for education and experience can cause recruiters and hiring managers to make assumptions about age and level of experience — if someone is perceived as “too young” or “too old” their resume can be eliminated from the application process. As well, resume gaps or career breaks are often viewed negatively, with hiring managers assuming that the candidate is lazy, unmotivated, or uncommitted to their career. This is often not the case as there are many reasons why someone has decided to take time off work including caregiving, parental leave, travel, or health issues. Read more about the stigmatization of resume gaps here. Adiitionally, qualified candidates that have learned English as their second language can be disregarded due to how their communicate over written word. Their qualifications and skills may exceed expectations, however they could be dismissed due to the biases this causes in the selection process.
Embracing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives is crucial for building a stronger, more innovative workplace. By implementing DEI practices in recruitment and hiring, organizations can break down barriers, creating an environment where talent from all backgrounds can thrive. These initiatives not only expand the talent pool so you can find the most qualified person for the job, they enhance creativity, problem-solving, and productivity by bringing together diverse perspectives and experiences.
One of the major ways DNA* supports DEI is through our skills based approach to connecting talent to your company. We are ditching the resume and instead focusing on candidates highlighting what they know, who they are, and what they value on their DNA* profiles and using this information to provide an assessment of how well they fit your organizations based on their qualifications and compatibility. By removing the resume and leading with competency and skills, DNA* is connecting you to the right people for your team.
