How to facilitate an inclusive recruitment process

Taylor Root is committed to partnering with our clients in the development of their DEI strategy, recruitment processes and talent pipelining. Inclusive recruitment is the process of interviewing and hiring a diverse set of individuals through valuing different backgrounds, opinions and experiences.

Many clients we work with are not sure where to begin when creating an inclusive recruitment process. Here are some suggestions.

Before your advertise:

• Educate all your employees. Diversity and education training should be an ongoing process, not something you complete once to tick a box so run refresher courses. It should be engrained in your culture to ensure an inclusive environment for all employees which will retain talent for longer
• Your culture and brand is key. Do you proactively display your efforts in building an inclusive culture externally as well as internally so potential candidates looking at your website or social media will see an inclusive brand?
• Do you offer a well thought out benefits suite that can make all employees feel supported and potential employees keen to apply?
• You should set DEI targets and measure your results so you have accountability as you would in other areas of your business. Create metrics to assess your progress in hiring and retaining a diverse workforce

When you advertise:

• Be mindful of the language used on job adverts and position descriptions. Is it inclusive and encouraging? Showcase what you can offer a potential employee and avoid an exhaustive list of ‘key requirements’ that may deter great candidates from applying
• Ensure your website and the ease of applications have been considered from the perspective of all candidates that might be applying and any disabilities that they may have. For example, are the adverts easy to read for those with visual impairments, can candidate’s easily navigate through the application process, are there transcripts available if you have video content?
• Think creatively about how you could widen your search. Rethink the factors that you screen for. Question what traits you value most in candidates, why, and whether that’s based on your own bias or the hiring manager’s bias
• If you are a recruitment professional whether agency side or in-house challenge your clients and line managers!

The recruitment process:

• Once you receive CVs their presentation could be anonymised in different ways before being submitted to line managers. For example removing candidate names, removing education or names of academic institutions and, you can try fully anonymising CVs to remove as much potential for bias as possible. Arguably if you feel the need to anonymise you should perhaps ask yourself why and address any internal issues
• Include a diverse interview panel. Stakeholders involved in the recruitment process must understand and be able to articulate your commitment as a business to diversity and inclusion. This will also improve candidate experience and increase the strength of your employer brand which should increase the number of offers accepted
• Ask inclusive interview questions and ideally ask each candidate the same questions so that candidates can be properly benchmarked against each other. Using scorecards can help give a clearer result too
• Ask interviewers to submit feedback before discussing the candidate with each other to avoid building momentum bias towards a particular candidate

This article appears in our global in-house market report 2022 – click the link to download.