Diversity Sourcing Strategies

Organizations nowadays are ambitious to hire diversified team members from across different work cultures for one-goal-setting accomplishment, without compromising on inclusion and impartiality. To achieve such an objective, companies need a diversity sourcing strategy.

What is Diversity Sourcing?

Diversity sourcing is defined as hiring, recruiting, and selecting candidates from various backgrounds, cultures, genders, and LGBTQs, ensuring the representation of almost several tiers of society.

When organizations own a diversified workforce connected with different: cultures, genders, orientations, backgrounds, linguistics, geographies, demographics, races, and disabilities, the companies have a bunch of ideas, innovative clues, experiences, and expertise, and in return that results in better organizational performance.

Why are Diversity Recruiting Strategies Important?

The strategy of diversity in recruitment is important because it provides more than one source of experience, exposure, expertise, knowledge, skills, abilities, proficiencies, capabilities, workflow aptness, task admin cum management, emergent response plans, ideas, short-term and long-term goals, contingency planning, awareness, languages, cultures, etc. consequently resulting in an assertive innovation, more profitability, good at inclusion, better organizational reputation, and performance at par.

What is the Impact of Diverse Teams on Business Success?

The wider variety of collaborative thinking tools and techniques guides companies to foster novelty in the selection of guided decision-making with calculated risks due to the in-possession of diversified human resources.

Not only this, diversity in sourcing plays a pivotal role in creating a conducive workspace environment matching the maximum of your human capital, in terms of accommodating different people from different backgrounds.

Diversity Sourcing Best Practices

Diversity sourcing strategy best practices may include, but are not limited to:

Strategic Development

Set clear diversity objectives and routinely refine them by analyzing your competitors and industry trends. Regularly review and update your policies to reflect the latest best practices, ensuring that your strategy remains at the forefront of inclusivity and competitiveness. This ongoing adjustment helps your organization adapt to evolving societal and market demands.

Communication and Openness

Communicate your diversity goals clearly across all organizational levels and encourage an open dialogue about diversity and inclusion. Promoting transparency fosters trust and ensures that all employees are aligned with the company’s diversity initiatives. Remain open to innovative ideas and diverse perspectives, as they are crucial for creative problem-solving and driving sustainable growth.

Network and Brand Building

Develop a robust network by engaging with industry groups, diversity-focused organizations, and social platforms. Promote your diversity initiatives through effective social media strategies and diversified employment branding. This not only enhances your visibility but also attracts a diverse pool of candidates who see reflective values in your brand.

Inclusive Recruitment Initiatives

Implement inclusive recruitment practices by facilitating employee resource groups, offering targeted internship and returnship programs, and encouraging diverse employee referrals. These practices enhance your company's support network and create pathways for diverse talents, making your organization a more attractive employer.

Bias Reduction Techniques

Adopt blind hiring practices and conduct regular training sessions to address and reduce unconscious biases. This approach ensures that your recruitment processes judge candidates on their skills and potential rather than preconceived notions or irrelevant factors. It fosters fairness and equality in your hiring decisions, building a more diverse and capable workforce.

Technology Utilization

Utilize advanced technologies such as AI and dedicated recruitment software to streamline your talent acquisition process and access a wider, more diverse talent pool. This technology not only improves efficiency but also helps in maintaining consistency and fairness in the recruitment process, ensuring that diversity goals are met without compromise.

Inclusive Culture and Creative Thinking

Create a welcoming and safe environment for all candidates, ensuring they feel valued regardless of their background. Look beyond conventional qualifications to gauge a candidate’s potential and fit within the company culture. Encouraging creative thinking and problem-solving among your teams enhances innovation and leads to better business outcomes.

6 Effective Diversity Sourcing Strategies

For sourcing and recruiting diverse candidates, the below-mentioned techniques do help:

DEI Sourcing on LinkedIn

DEI (diversity, equity; inclusion) sourcing strategies on either LinkedIn, or elsewhere, is an effective diversified sourcing strategy that encompasses diversity, equity, and inclusion. Through DEI, companies adjust those groups or sub-groups, and people, who were unrepresentative in job markets earlier due to any reason. Those reasons could be color, caste, creed, religion, language, societal identification, gender, LGBTQ; etc.

Attending Themed Career Fairs

The themed career fairs and galas are yet another way to network with candidates and companies with similar interests. Attending such career fairs helps in creating big data for talent recruitment and then as per need selection of the right candidates for your present and future job requirements.

Looking Beyond Traditional Degrees and Education

Traditional degrees and education are not mere selection criteria nowadays. With those, and even without those in the case of a private sector company, if a candidate is well-suitable for the task you are looking to fulfill, that is the right candidate to hire. Here, exposure to a certain environment and hands-on experience cum expertise overtakes qualification.

Joining Diverse Online Communities in Your Industry

Employers are encouraged to join diverse talent online communication networks in their relevant industry. This not only provides you with industry insights but creates a hub and network of employers cum employees for a possible collaborative exchange program or job enrichment plan – say workers switching to higher ranks.

Proactively Asking for Referrals from Your Network

Ask proactively for referrals from your networks. This helps you right talent at the right time and the right place and position. Employers are suggested to create networks as helping hands for each other rather than competition. Collaboration is far better a serving the community than being market rivalries.

Therefore, our intellectual capital teams at WebHR, have changed the very names of target markets into serving segments, and collaboration except for competition; it has turned the entire business value system of an organization viewing users (instead of customers) and servers (and not the companies).

Using Smart Sourcing Tools for Diversity Recruitment

Utilization of smart sourcing tools for diversity recruitment is: organizations are encouraged to apply artificial intelligence into their businesses smart techniques help employers short-list their prospers based on certain keywords most relevant to their company’s job requirements, minimizing the human efforts and investing the same into innovation and strategic implementation at diverse business levels.

Enhancing Diversity in Candidate Recruitment and Screening

Following are the talent hunt tips that will help you certainly:

Right Candidates Search (RCS)

The right candidate search can be made possible through visiting talent hubs at educational institutions, universities, talent hunt gala, networking with organizations, own employees’ referrals, references of friends and fellows, university alumni, family, social networks, societal hubs, and meeting point messing and gym, and the same.

Recruiting diverse candidates from Within Your Organization (RYWO)

Another source is looking from within your company for the best available human capital and uplifting them to higher positions. Your existing manpower knows about your company culture and organizational goals and values, an added advantage to invest little in training.

Job Enrichment in HR (JEHR)

Empowering your manpower by assigning them different tasks is known as job enrichment in HR management and development. This technique works worthwhile changes as required by the time in business companies. This is yet another source of sourcing your team through the enhancement of an existing diverse workforce.

MBERG - Management by Employee Resource Groups

MBERG or management by employee resource groups is a way forward to inclusion and diversity in organizations whereby workers with similar interests are networked voluntarily to source better human resources creating a win-win scenario for employers and employees. These networks help a great deal in diversity sourcing. Employers can hire workers like hiring teams entirely for a project via referring to MBERG from within available talent pools. Potential candidates are hired through MBERG to attain diversity recruitment.

Terms of Reference Think-tank Revision (TRTR)

Revise your current think tank of terms of references (job descriptions) matching the all-candidates requirements. For example, the utilization of words like recently graduated or the same excludes experienced personnel from applying for a job posting in an advert.

Considerable Returnship Program (CRP)

CRP or considerable returnship program is another way forward to source a diversified workforce in companies. These are the employees who were away as caregivers to their families (most of those are females) due to any unavoidable or avoidable but important reason(s), they are inclined to back to the office after a few years of service gap. CRP is a platform to regain the experienced workforce back onboard.

Anonymous Resume Procedures (ARP) on LinkedIn

ARP or anonymous resume procedure on LinkedIn has helped recruiters avoid biases thereby it has hidden names and photos of people. This way, selectors are saved from neglection of a potential candidate, which may be the renowned ones in a particular field, available in the industry. The identifiable information is saved to be seen by selectors, bypasses and saves the potential prejudices by the possible employers otherwise.

The Books of Rules ruled out, but not entirely

The books of rules in terms of recruitment, except for the organizational values, basic regulations of the state, federal rules, etc., may be ruled out, as there is no particular book of rules when you are looking for a diversified workforce but basic knowledge, skills, and abilities.

This way employers may rarely miss a candidate possessing a reliable job task skill set. Companies, nowadays, are utilizing AI in HR to identify the KSA (knowledge, skills; abilities) profiling curriculum vitae into specifics to avail on surface representative and relevant skills required for your specific job adverts.

Harvard’s IAT (Implicit Association Test)

Harvard’s Implicit Association Test (IAT) is additionally advantageous for organizations in selecting and sourcing a diversified workforce. IAT helps employers screen potential biasedness amongst candidates in terms of any particular behavior, etc. This tool also helps in the assessment of similarities and differences among job aspirants. IAT is a useful tool for your existing employees’ behavior assessments.

Auditing Job Ads for Inclusivity

Audit your job ads for inclusivity and diversity hiring purposes. Avoid using feminine phrases (like loyal, committed, patient) or masculine wording (say powerful, aggressive, rock-like, dominating, etc.) in your job posting advertisements to present your organization as an equal-opportunity employer.

What is a Diversity Sourcing Audit?

A diversity sourcing audit is a systematic gathering, analysis, interpreting, and resulting of your organizational diversified human resources data for the reasons of diversity and inclusion, whereby diversity matches the very requirements of your organizational set-up.

For this reason, it is imperative to conduct a climate survey to what your employees think of you, being your win-win stakeholders, assists you in the provision of an edge over the competition, not for the sake of winning the target markets but serving the segments.

Automating Shortlisting with an Applicant Tracking System (ATS)

Automated shortlisting with an ATS – applicant tracking system – helps your HR department through end-to-end screening of job aspirants in terms of their KSA profiles - knowledge skills and abilities. The system stores, Tracks, and automates certain tasks for your human resource functions that are otherwise time-consuming.

Refining the Screening Process

Refine, and review, your screening process right from application receiving to shortlisting, interview process, and through reference reassurance. See for possible alterations, if possible, and match your business needs.

Minimal and to-the-point unavoidable requirements in your employment forms are encouraged by candidates. Avoid unnecessary info or too many details. Keep on the minimum qualification, number of experiences or fresh, additional knowledge or skills needed for the job.

Reducing Unconscious Bias in Hiring

Unconscious biases in hiring may be the prejudices that we hold outside our consciousness. For example, any particular caste, creed, religion, nationality, group membership, ethnic background, etc. Reducing unconscious biases reduces the risks of a wrong hire. Employers may reduce it by anonymous CVs and resumes without a photo organization a membership logo, etc.

Increasing Diversity in Sourcing, Screening, and Hiring

Employers can increase diversity in sourcing, screening, and hiring through the following strategies:

Targeting Sources Where Diverse Candidates Congregate

Attend to the ceremonials, congregational galas, and the similar, where diverse candidates meet up and congregate. The best technique for this is the social networks and social media platforms. Nowadays, marketing companies are utilizing augmented reality through big data analytics on Hadoop computing, HR can imitate the ideation similarity for progressive plan purposes.

Offering Internships to Focused (Targeted) Groups

Offer internships to different focused (target) groups that may be otherwise underrepresented groups due to several societal biased reasons. This may be one of the LGBTQs, or some groups, sub-groups, or minorities.

Using Blind Resumes and Interviews

Blind resumes and interviews are possible through social media. Anonymous Resume Procedures (ARP) on LinkedIn has helped recruiters avoid possible potential biases, and hiding names and photos of people.

Harnessing AI for Resume Review

Artificial Intelligence (AI) harnesses your HR business via resume review, making available your required fields of interest on the surface in a click in a few moments, which otherwise used to take days and weeks to look into manually. Particular KSAs, or any other, are on the screen in no time, saving precious HR time to invest the same into modernization profitability management.

Rethinking Screening Factors

Employers are advised to rethink regarding screening factors. Previously, these factors used to be particular and rigid, but with time, innovation has been flexible. Do not merely look for qualifications and experiences, but include a concise JD (job description) in your CVs (for employees) and job adverts (for employers), blind CV reviews (personality identifiable info removed from a CV), use of HR AI Software, utilization of assessment tools, checking with educational (with the institution) and experiential (with the previous employer) number of years mentioned in the CV, checking references and referrals, this may help.

Additionally, the aforementioned not only helps in screening overhaul but also saves time along with process improvements at the organizational level.