How to Recruit a Diverse Workforce in 2023

Let’s address the elephant in the room. Building a diverse workforce is about more than just tips, tricks, and short-term changes. It’s about building an ever-growing respect for diversity and inclusion and continuing to learn as time goes on.

Blog posts, like this one, are a kickoff to a dedicated effort that deserves your attention and care. Read on to learn more about building a diverse workforce that will bring you success for years to come.

What Is Workplace Diversity?

Workplace diversity is the differences in characteristics among employees in a workplace. This can include race, ethnicity, gender, education level, etc.

Since the social justice movements of 2020 and beyond, workplace diversity has become a critical aspect of day-to-day life. In fact, 76% of people say that diversity is important to them when looking for a new role. Investing in diversity means investing not just in the right thing to do, but in a value that jobseekers require.

When our companies reflect the world that we do business in, we not only get financial success, we build trust within our community.

How to Recruit a Diverse Workforce

When you’ve decided to invest time into transforming your diversity hiring practices, it can feel overwhelming knowing where to start. These 5 steps will get you on the right track!

Start Where You’re At

Before you do anything else, understand where you are at and what you can do to make people more comfortable and respected at work.

Ask yourself questions like:

• How accessible is our workplace for disabled people?
• Is our leadership trained on how to handle racial microaggressions at work?
• What sort of support do we provide to parents returning to the workplace?
• Do we have any biases that we think are “no big deal”?

Beyond the personal side, look at the data! How are different groups represented at every level of your organization? Do you experience a particular loss in retention amongst a particular group? Who is most likely to get a promotion on your team? Are salaries and benefits equal throughout your company?

By looking directly at the data, you can avoid trying to tackle personal biases with your own good intentions and instead make decisions based on that data.

Diversity hiring isn’t a passing fad. It relies on fostering a culture of inclusion and belonging so that all team members feel psychologically safe and welcome when they come to work.

This step will likely be the most difficult. You’ll need to confront some long held biases that you and your team likely may not realize that you have. Working with an expert in diversity in the workplace can be a great help!

Invest in Unexpected Talent Sources

Think about it like fishing: Let’s say your neighborhood has a fishing pond. Every month, it is loaded with bass, so every time you go fishing there, you catch a bass. But you need salmon for the recipe you’re trying to make. If you go to your local pond and expect to catch a salmon, you’re going to be disappointed. 

You need to fish somewhere else to catch the type of fish you’re looking for.

Deciding to recruit a diverse workforce is similar. If your current workplace looks more similar than different, you need to search for candidates in sources that are different from what you usually do. You need to fish from a new pond.

Have you ever considered funding or supporting professional development for your more junior staff or building out an internship or apprenticeship program? What about hosting a job fair for recently certified professionals? 

At CareerCircle, we partner with employers, like you, who are passionate about recruiting a diverse workforce, but need a helping hand to get going. Our packaged service offerings can provide you with everything you need to get diverse talent into our pipeline, but we are always happy to build a package that directly serves your goals. 

If you’re just starting out with diversity hiring, we recommend speaking with our team about hosting a virtual job fair that will help increase your employer brand and the diversity of your talent pool.

Get in touch with us today to learn more!

Embrace Equity

The fact of the matter is that equality often isn’t enough to really make the needed changes for workplace diversity. Cue the role of equity.

In terms of recruiting and hiring, equality means providing everyone with the same resources, no matter their need. Whereas equity means providing the resources that that individual needs to be successful.

For example, equality means requiring all interviews to happen between 12 and 1 PM ET. Equity would be scheduling interviews at any time that is best for the jobseeker (like after they have completed their workday at their current role).

The more equity you can bring into your recruiting process, the better. What equity is in your situation varies depending on your current process, but some things to consider are:

• How are candidates with disabilities supported through the hiring process? Can we provide any resources to make the process more accessible?
• Can we provide any benefits to appeal to parents returning to the workforce or entry-level people starting off their career?
• Are we judging candidates based on traits that may be out of their control like eye contact? How can we transform how we judge candidates to ensure a bias-free environment?

Rework Your Job Requirements and Postings

Did you know that women apply for 20% fewer jobs than men despite having otherwise similar job search behavior? This often stems from feeling like they have to match all of a job posting’s requirements before even considering applying.

Requiring certain industry experience or education, in-office work, and more isn’t a problem if it’s truly needed for someone to complete the job. But if they are more of a “nice-to-have” requirement, you could be driving otherwise qualified, diverse candidates away from your role.

When you are writing job requirements, make sure that the skills and responsibilities you list are actually necessary for success in the role.

It’s also important to consider the exact words used in your job posting. 

Textio, a workplace language guidance software, found that “common phrases that exert a bias effect…include exhaustive, enforcement, and fearless (all masculine-tone) and transparent, catalyst, and in touch with (all feminine-tone).” But it’s not just that the words put out a particular tone in the posting. It affects hiring outcomes. Textio’s study found that, “In jobs where a man is hired, the original job post averages almost twice as many masculine-tone phrases as feminine. In jobs where a woman is hired, Textio finds the exact opposite: twice as many feminine-tone phrases as masculine in the job post.”

To take some actionable steps, check out this ebook from Kat Kibben, an expert job post writer who helps teams optimize their postings with an eye for removing bias and increasing clarity. 

Adopt a 360° View of a Candidate

When a jobseeker creates a profile in CareerCircle, they are prompted to fill out what we call their Candidate 360° profile. This profile gathers information like, contact information, employment preferences, passion projects, career history, compensation preferences, certifications, and more.

For the hiring managers on our platform, this helps showcase not just a candidate’s work experience, but more of what makes them who they are!

Remember that you can bring this 360° understanding to every candidate you interact with by understanding that their experience and skills go far beyond what is just on a resume. Valuing the candidate and making an effort to understand how their transferable, hard, and soft skills blend to become the person they are is a simple way that you increase the diversity in your talent pool today.

When it comes to recruiting a diverse workforce, sometimes you need to make major changes that completely transform the things that you do. Other times, small, incremental changes will create the sustainable change that you need. Regardless of what steps you need to take or where this journey might take you, the effort is worth it to ensure that your workplace is welcoming, successful, and open to all.