The great resignation has had far-reaching impacts. Businesses are facing productivity and morale issues as they struggle to meet their staffing needs.
Additionally, there has been an impact on diversity that is a bit of a double-edged sword. While pandemic concerns have been a primary focus, diversity troubles have also led to increased attrition.
Many workers, especially those in the tech sector, have indicated that they have left or considered leaving jobs where they didn’t feel welcome in the culture.
This feeling adds a whole new complexity as hiring managers are faced with improving their diversity recruiting efforts and retaining existing employees who may not feel particularly wanted.
Fortunately, this is not an impossible challenge. By deploying the right strategies, you can maintain a diverse workforce.
Don’t Speed Up Recruiting Processes
If you’re losing team members and struggling with meeting hiring quotas, you may feel tempted to rush things along.
Unfortunately, this creates bigger issues over time. When hiring teams feel pressured, they often abandon the processes designed to prevent bias in recruiting and hiring.
To continue to meet your diversity goals and staffing needs, you’ll need to create a thoughtful strategy. You won’t solve this issue in the short term.
Create a Role by Role Strategy
Most diversity and inclusion issues aren’t binary. You can’t fix them with comprehensive, company-wide strategies. Instead, you need to create a plan for each role you are trying to fill. Before you begin the recruiting process for any position, ask the following questions:
- What are the specific diversity issues that need to be addressed with this hire?
- How will the organization be impacted if you fail to hire for diversity here?
- Are there changes you need to make to your usual recruiting methods?
- Will you need more time than usual to fill this position?
Once you answer these questions, you can begin creating your strategy. You’ll also be able to manage expectations regarding the amount of time you will need to fill each position.
Reconsider How You are Defining and Measuring Diversity
Many companies are struggling to understand why they are losing team members over diversity-related frustrations. They sincerely believe they have been successful at hiring a diverse team.
Unfortunately, the problem is that they’ve been working from an outdated and narrow definition of diversity. However, you can only reveal this problem by looking closely at a diversity report or other data.
One issue is that many organizations have focused only on race and binary gender as they set and track goals for diversity in hiring.
They miss disability status, gender identity, culture, and sexual orientation. It’s impossible to create a diverse workforce by recruiting from underrepresented communities unless everyone understands what those are.
Additionally, organizations often consider diversity at an organizational level. They don’t consider how representation or lack of it can impact morale in different departments or executive groups. Your company may not seem very diverse to someone who doesn’t see anyone like themselves in your C-suite.
Widening your perspective on this issue a bit can help you see where diversity is an issue. You can then create a truly holistic hiring approach.
Prioritize Skills and Trainability Over Candidate Profile
It’s going to be difficult to meet your diversity goals when you create idealized candidate profiles. The truth is that candidates from groups that don’t have much representation might have great skills hiding behind non-traditional candidate profiles.
It’s time to reconsider how you are defining the ideal candidate. Otherwise, you’re going to miss your goals, and you’re going to struggle to hire good talent during the great resignation.
Remember that job applicants from diverse backgrounds may not have a candidate profile that matches traditional expectations. However, they may have the right skills, experience, trainability, and organizational fit. Because of that, it may be time to rewrite those profiles.
For example, do you require a degree from a top 10 university or favor candidates who have worked for certain companies? The chances are that these requirements are making it difficult for you to recruit candidates from various backgrounds.
Take Another Look at Your Recruiting Sources
If you struggle to find candidates to meet your diversity goals, you may be looking for candidates in the wrong places. Are you relying on networking? It is a useful tool unless your network lacks diversity.
The same is true for alumni associations or job placement centers at colleges and universities. If the demographics there aren’t diverse, you will have a hard time making progress towards creating a diverse workplace.
There are some steps you can take to ensure that your sources are working for you, including:
- Communicating with recruiters about your diversity goals and expectations
- Reaching out to colleges and universities with diverse populations
- Encouraging teams to use their networks to reach a range of candidates
Doing these things won’t just allow you to reach your diversity goals. You will also be in a better position to fill roles quickly.
Improve the Candidate Experience
For many companies, the hiring process itself is problematic. It leaves too much room for conscious and unconscious bias to influence hiring decisions.
Additionally, different candidates often have entirely different experiences as they go through the hiring process. This inconsistency makes it impossible to make objective decisions based on concrete criteria.
You must educate hiring teams in the ways that unintentional bias can be a problem in recruiting and hiring. Next, consider implementing a blind hiring process. This strategy involves presenting candidates with all information that could trigger any bias or subjectivity removed.
Blind hiring forces hiring managers to look only at experience and qualifications. Finally, use a structured interview process where candidates are all asked the same questions
