Having a diverse workforce provides a variety of benefits. By bringing together different perspectives and backgrounds, you position your company to achieve higher levels of innovation, making it easier to stay ahead of the competition. Having team and project members with different backgrounds helps by bringing multiple perspectives to the table to generate the best ideas and the best results.
While many businesses want to increase diversity, figuring out how to begin can be a challenge. Unconscious biases can stifle the most robust programs, even if it is unintentional.
At nTech, we understand the value of diversity in the workplace, and it’s a core tenet of our Talent Direct service process. By tapping into a wide range of talent pools, we can help your business build an ecosystem of talent that provides talented candidates from diverse backgrounds for each position needed.
If you are looking for new ways to integrate diversity into your hiring approach, here are three ways to get started:
If your goal is to overcome unconscious bias, blind resume screening can be an ideal solution. The process involves removing all information that may identify a candidate as part of a particular group, typically by redacting their name, address, school name, or similar details that may indicate the job seeker’s gender or other demographic information.
This allows all resumes to be reviewed based solely on the skills and experiences presented. Those who are the most qualified – as determined by their credentials – will advance in the hiring process, as all other differentiators have been functionally eliminated at this stage.
Often, hiring managers will favor candidates that remind them of themselves. When a job seeker shares a similar background with an interviewer, it can make the interviewer feel inherently more comfortable, a feeling that can lead them to believe the candidate is more suitable than their skills and experience show.
By having a diverse talent acquisition team, you create a form of checks and balances that can prevent hiring decisions from being made based on this artificial feeling of familiarity. In the end, it allows for another type of unconscious bias to be controlled, which can lead to more diverse hiring.
Having diverse interviewers also makes diverse candidates feel more welcome by the company. This can improve your company’s reputation as a potential employer while also increasing the odds that they will have an effective interview, as the candidate may feel less nervous during the meeting.
When you use value-based hiring, you increase the odds of attracting job seekers who find those values meaningful, increasing the odds that they’ll derive intrinsic satisfaction from working in the role and be more engaged on the job.
This approach can allow you to focus on finding the ideal candidate for the position based on a driving force behind the company’s culture. Ultimately, this may lead to more successful hiring, as these professionals may be better suited to thrive in the environment.
Making diversity a core value in hiring starts with having an inclusive approach. If you would like to learn more about integrating diversity into your hiring process, the professionals at nTech can help. Contact us to discuss your hiring goals today and see how our expertise can benefit you.