The talent competition is fierce, given the plentiful options available to job seekers. It's no easy task when you're looking to improve your high-volume hiring while maintaining your efforts toward diversity, equity, and inclusion. However, DEI is part of the recruitment journey, and it should be present in every candidate touchpoint and recruitment marketing tool.
Enlisting a hiring strategy that allows you to scale up and attract the best, diverse talent for long-term success and growth demands that you prioritize empathy, authenticity, self-awareness, respect and transparency in every interaction and touchpoint. It also means letting technology do the heavy lifting.
The current state of diversity, equity and inclusion in recruiting.
Kickoff diversity recruiting with human-led storytelling
When considering recruiting equitably for a high volume of talent, look closely at your employer's brand. Communicating your mission, goals and values should be baked into your DEI journey and apparent in every candidate-focused campaign or message. And it needs to be authentic and able to resonate with all audiences.
To do this and do it right, you need to let employees tell their own stories in their own words.
If you have an inclusive workplace culture, you set the tone for attracting more diverse talent particularly when your employees are your brand advocates.
To establish integrity and build trust, you should also share initiatives and progress about your company's DEI efforts on external company channels so employees and candidates not just appreciate the glimpse into your culture but also your commitment to diversity initiatives. What makes it believable is having your employees be the messengers of that story. After all, they're the ones who live it every day, in every way.
Be consistent and thoughtful
Social posts, web copy and blogs showcasing events like Black History Month are key to creating an equitable and attractive culture. Alone, though, they are not enough. Thoughtful, consistent messaging that resonates comes with consistency and repetition.
Establish a dedicated diversity resource page on your career website that communicates your DEI goals and activities. Share statistics that align with DEI's goals, aspirations and challenges. Inform employees and candidates about events, programs, talent communities and affinity groups designed for DEI candidates.
Ultimately, your DEI initiatives need to consider every angle and be transparent about what your organization is doing to foster an inclusive, diverse and equitable workplace.
Let technology pave the way for recruiting at scale
To successfully recruit for high-volume hiring, you need to equip yourself with technologies that attract top talent while eliminating time-consuming tasks.
Meanwhile, DEI content must exist in your marketing videos, testimonials and core messaging, on your career website, in campaigns, job descriptions and ads, and in processes like assessments and interviews.
- Craft bias-free job descriptions and job ads with a DEI Plugin
- Use programmatic media to post on diverse job boards
- Ensure your brand advertising targets diverse hires so diverse talent sees your posts
- Share employee and customer testimonials and ERGs and enable an accessible, anytime-chat function to answer candidates' questions when it's convenient for them
- Use your CRM to build targeted talent pools and communicate various DEI initiatives in relevant channels
- Reduce bias and better understand candidates with on-demand video interviews that hide candidates' names, lets them explain their interests and speak to their skills in an engaging way
- Enlist post-apply assessments that dig into skills and expertise rather than focus solely on personal attributes
- Utilize behavioral assessments to identify behavioral styles, preferences and tendencies for engagement
Learn more about where diversity content and brand content go.
Implementing DEI at scale
As the talent recruitment industry advances automation and machine learning, talent acquisition technologies must continue to help recruiting teams minimize bias and strengthen inclusion.
By significantly reducing time-consuming HR functions, AI and machine learning free up recruiters' time, letting them build relationships with people their specialty. AI and machine learning also help reduce bias through pattern matching and screening resumes to identify qualifications while ignoring human factors that can negatively influence hiring.
To help those efforts:
- Consider using a conversational assistant to screen initially without appearance bias.
- Eliminate school, graduation dates, names and other personal fields from resumes to decrease conscious and unconscious bias around age, gender and ethnicity
- Expand assessments beyond the resume and keyword matching to include skills at the forefront early on.
- Test your messaging, subject lines and job descriptions so you know what resonates with different types of talented audiences
- Focus programmatic advertising campaigns to ensure spending hits niche job boards, publications and media with diverse audiences and broad demographics and regions.
Does technology replace the human touch? Never fear: AI supports, but does not drive, candidate search. Recruiters need to monitor the predictions and recommendations to ensure they are bias-free, looking not just at relevancy but also at engagement.
