Diversifying your team through a diversity recruiting strategy will allow your company to develop into a more modern, accepting community that celebrates differences. More companies and organizations are reviewing their hiring practices to enrich their teams with people from all backgrounds.

At The Sourcery, we have developed a diversity recruiting strategy that focuses on attaining and attracting diverse candidates. However, before we get into what we do, let’s discuss diversity itself and why it’s essential for companies.

Why is Diversity Important?

As science has shown us, diversity is good in nature, in our diets, in our hobbies, and also in our workplaces and social circles.  Moreover, diversity can enhance creativity and stimulate the exchange of ideas between members of a group. It’s been proven that the more diverse a team is, the better the team will perform under stress and in difficult situations.

This is especially obvious in the workplace, where tasks need to be performed efficiently. When solutions to problems have a deadline, words need to be exchanged professionally and efficiently. Diversity in the workplace makes us smarter as a whole.

What is Diversity Hiring?

To put it simply, diversity hiring focuses on removing racial, sexual, ideological, physical and or faith-based bias from any hiring process. Systemic bias can exist in hiring processes subtly, and so biases may not be obvious to stakeholders of the hiring process. Therefore, any company looking to attract a more diverse candidate pool should conduct an audit of their own hiring process to see if there is any evidence of bias or favoritism.

Five Ways to Diversify Your Staff

1. Start Diversifying Early

Startups should actively seek to diversify their staff from the beginning. If you’re starting a company from the ground up, focusing on keeping your team diverse from the very beginning is key. Startups often rely on a robust referral process to quickly scale during early stages. Building a diverse team from the onset will drive a positive culture and sphere of influence within your company.

2. Maintain Standards from the Ground Up

A company needs employees across all company levels to come from diverse backgrounds. Therefore, diversity needs to be seen in all departments, including management and consultant positions. Diversity in leadership positions can help strengthen teams and improve the efficacy of any company.

3. Spread Awareness in Your Staff

Employees might wonder what the benefits of increased diversity among their team, or what types of diversity there are within their company. For this reason, diversity training and educational seminars are practical methods of helping employees understand more about diversity. A variety of companies have begun celebrating the individual diversity of their employees. They are opting to host events where diverse employees can share stories of their cultural or societal experiences. The more we know about our colleagues, the better we can communicate and work together.

4. Consider All Aspects of Diversity

When we discuss diversity, it can be easy to forget about all the different kinds of diversity. While there are the obvious ones like age, gender, and race, these aren’t the only examples of diversity. A non-inclusive work environment can make daily activities difficult for employees who have disabilities. Language can also come up when we’re discussing diversity, as employees who come from different linguistic backgrounds may use words or phrases differently. These are just a few examples of all the different kinds of diversity we see in people.

5. Increase Diversity in Candidate Screening

Common criteria for screening potential candidates such as names or the schools they have attended  often decreases the diversity of the candidate pipeline. If after you conduct your diversity hiring audit it reveals a lacking pipeline – you may need a partner to help you get a diverse pipeline of candidates that have been screened and vetted.

How Can The Sourcery Help?

Whether helping a newly-funded startup making their first big hire, or just taking the heat off your in-house team for a while, we fill your open roles with a pipeline of highly qualified candidates and put a proactive diversity talent strategy in place for the future.

With hiring performance metrics and other ways of collecting and analyzing hiring data, we can effectively bolster any organization with diverse qualified hires. All candidates are prescreened, and will only be considered if they’re more than qualified for the positions your company needs.

Click below to schedule a meeting with me and we will hash out the details of your diversity recruiting plan.