There is a serious lack of diversity in many organizations worldwide. Management teams are still predominantly one gender and one race in many companies. However, this can have a severe impact on productivity, creativity, and even your bottom line. With many employers currently realizing the urgent need to diversify their workforce, they are turning to fact-based hiring techniques to make this happen. By hiring based on fact and not feeling, you can make better hiring decisions and also increase diversity in your company.
Why is Diversity Important in Hiring?
Diversity in the workplace is not about meeting any type of quota; there are plenty of compelling reasons why diversity is crucial for your business.
Diverse companies are often more productive than their counterparts. By nature, diverse people come from different backgrounds, meaning that they have unique skillsets. Imagine having more skills put to work towards your organizational goals – that’s precisely what diversity can achieve for you.
Amp up the creativity in your workplace by having a more diverse array of staff. The various personalities on a team can come together to be more creative than ever. When you hire people who all think the same, it can be challenging to brainstorm new ideas, get imaginative, and come up with new innovations. However, this comes naturally to more diverse teams who have a wider range of thoughts to share.
When you hire based on job fit alone, you’re likely to see diversity in your company increase. As you are open to a broader range of candidates, you will have more people to choose between, many of whom are well-qualified for the position. Hiring the best person for the role is an excellent way to reduce turnover. People who are suited to the position they are in tend to be happier and more productive. You’ll have fewer people leave your business, meaning lower recruitment costs and fewer onboarding expenses.
Last but not least, diversity can increase your profits. One survey uncovered that more companies with diverse management teams increase their profits as opposed to those with less diversity. So, it’s time to use fact-based hiring techniques to bring in a wider variety of staff into your organization.
Steps to Using Fact-Based Hiring Techniques to Use to Increase Diversity
Gather HR Data
Before you can begin to fix the issue of diversity in your company with fact-based hiring techniques, you must first understand where you are currently at. This will give you data to measure yourself against later.
The first step is to find out about your employees. Analyze what split of genders you have in your business, how many people of each ethnicity there are, whether you have any staff who speak other languages, and so on.
You must also be able to access the same information on job applicants. Hopefully, you are targeting an equitable split of genders, ethnicities, and ages. However, you may not be. If this is the case, it’s a learning opportunity that shows you the gaps in your recruitment process, and you can then work to fix these.
Determine What is Required for Success in the Role
When it comes time to hire for each newly available position, sit down and outline which attributes it takes to succeed in that role. Make a list of the traits and skills that the person in this job must have. This is one of the best things you can do to support your fact-based hiring techniques, as you can refer back to this list later when deciding who is the best candidate for the position.
Figure Out Your Objective Hiring Methods
Now, how will you hire based solely on the factors you outlined in step 2? Maybe you’ll use resume parsing software to specifically seek out these skills or implement pre-employment testing to determine how the candidates measure on these attributes. Think of anything you can use which will give you objective data. There are many fact-based hiring techniques that you can put into practice here, such as:
- Resume parsing
- Blind recruitment process
- Standardized interviews
- Cognitive ability testing
Assign Methods to Types of Roles
The positions you hire for will fall under different job families. These are the grouping of roles that require similar skills and abilities. For example, a data analyst could be put in a similar category to a financial planner due to the attributes required. However, a salesperson or receptionist position call for entirely different traits.
Decide which tools are appropriate for each type of job family. This will act in future as guidelines for hiring managers and recruiters so that they know which selection processes are suitable for each position. For example, analytical roles may require a numerical reasoning test, while salesperson roles may undergo personality testing.
Measure Your Results and Adjust as Required
Once you have implemented the above four steps and gone through some recruitment processes, it’s time to measure your results. At this point, you can look back at the data gathered in step 1. How has the make-up of your employees changed? Did you manage to hire more diverse candidates? If not, why not? Answering these questions will go a long way towards keeping yourself accountable for what you set out to do – increase diversity through fact-based hiring techniques.
If the diversity of your hires is increasing, then keep going with the methods you have implemented, tweaking as you see fit. If not, it’s time to reflect on what’s not working in the recruitment process and make adjustments as needed. Maybe you’re not effectively minimizing bias during the interview process, or perhaps the pre-employment assessment you chose is not suitable for the role you’re hiring for. There are a number of possibilities for you to explore and change before your next hire.
By basing your hiring decisions on objective facts and data, it is possible to remove bias in hiring and increase diversity in your organization. Fact-based hiring techniques are becoming more and more common as people realize the value that diversity can bring to your company. With a more productive workforce, increased creativity, and higher profits, investing in diversity is certainly worth it.
