Many employers think they are taking the necessary steps to ensure a diverse workforce by having an Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) statement on their job postings or their website; but is this really working? Are we really creating an inclusive and equal workplace if we aim to simply diversify? Let’s look through the seven not-so-easy steps your organization can take to reevaluate your recruiting practices and commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.  

Step One: Performing a Needs Assessment 

First things first, recruiting begins with figuring out what you really need. Are you backfilling someone and looking for a replacement, or are you starting fresh and expanding the team? Does your organization have a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion or perhaps an Affirmative Action Plan (AAP)? This is where all recruiting truly begins; before the posting even hits the streets.   

If you are looking to replace someone, really ask yourself if this next person needs to be exactly the same as the person who is leaving. Ideally, we would find someone with the same competencies, but without some of those annoying habits they had like occasionally arriving to meetings late. The truth is simple; that is not going to happen. Every recruiter knows that each person comes with their own quirks and bad habits, but we seem to forget that when recruiting to backfill a position. By looking for someone with similar competencies to the exiting employee, not the exact skills, organizations can potentially bring that open position to a whole new level of production and expertise! This is where an external recruiter can help objectify the candidate search.  

Want to see a real-life example? Let’s say the exiting employee had a bachelor’s degree with one year of hands-on experience when they came on but your top candidate has a G.E.D. and five years of hands-on experience. Can these two bring similar skills to the table? Let’s bring in that top candidate for an interview to learn more about their skills and abilities!  

If you have a brand-new position to fill, be realistic about what qualifications and/or credentials are necessary. Just because you have always required a Microsoft Office certification, doesn’t mean someone who has been playing around in Excel for years can’t get you to the same reports. In fact, they might be even better!  

Step Two: Developing the Position’s Posting 

When drafting your posting, including those “weed-out” requirements will only hold you back. Do you really need someone to have 1-3 years of hands-on experience in customer service, or can that be taught? Or, if you would have considered the G.E.D. candidate with five years of experience, requiring a degree in the first place is limiting your candidate pool, and therefore, potential diverse applicants. Remember to require competencies required to do the job, not characteristics or accolades. 

Something else you can do in your posting is talk about your commitment to DEI. This is where that policy you drafted actually comes handy! What unique characteristics about your culture is welcoming to diverse applicants? Why should someone want to work for you? Be sure to share this and any other benefits or perks in the posting and even during the interview process.  

Step Three: Reviewing the Employment Application 

Let’s also think about the application itself! Here are some tips to keep in mind:  

• If you do not have 100+ employees or an Affirmative Action Plan (AAP), you should not be asking your applicants to self-identify their demographics (gender, age, ethnicity, etc.). If you are responsible to collect this information, do not take this into consideration in whether someone advances to the next recruitment stage or not. In fact, file these away elsewhere separate from the applications all together, so even the deepest implicit biases won’t be affected. 

• When not requiring a college degree, it might be best if the Education Section of an application doesn’t have several boxes to insert information on your high school, college, and graduate degrees, along with a section for all your certifications and extracurricular activities. Believe it or not, the fact that an applicant is an Iowa Hawkeye Football season ticket holder should make zero difference in how you treat them as an applicant.   

• Get on board with the Ban the Box initiative. Although this isn’t legally mandated, remove the question about felony crimes from your application, and have a robust background check policy that strictly defines what will and will not disqualify someone for the role they are applying for.  

• When asking for references, be clear on your expectations. Would you be willing to hear from family members and friends or would you prefer former supervisors and coworkers? If this could be an applicant’s first job, what will you do then? Having a plan and a script with work-related questions is paramount to keep this process consistent and objective.  

Step Four: Advertising the Open Position 

We cannot simply post the position on our website or a job board and call it a day. We need to actually put together a recruitment strategy. If your organization has a statement or a commitment to diversifying the workforce, as the numbers indicate a business purpose for doing so (Here are the Numbers), let’s get away from a simple diversity statement and do something about it! If you have an Affirmative Action Plan (AAP), your organization will have goals to address any disparate impact, which you need to take steps to correct. Disparate impact happens when a defined minority group is inadvertently or even blatantly impacted in the hiring process. The purpose of an AAP is to reveal how many qualified applicants there are from each specific minority group where you are hiring. Disparate impact happens when we’re not finding and/or considering these populations for our open positions. If you have a commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and stopping disparate impact at your workplace, finding these candidates becomes your recruiting strategy.  

Now that we have thought through our job requirements and the recruiting strategy, it’s time to take action! Whether you have a specific goal identified in your AAP, or you generally would like to take a more inclusive approach to hiring, where you post open positions makes a big difference. If you are only posting positions online, only those applicants with access to internet and a computer will even be exposed to the opportunity itself. Similarly, if you are an employer who does not have or will not accept paper applications, you are excluding another large group of potentially qualified individuals. While I am not advocating all employers start printing paper postings and taping them to lamp posts on the street, some “boots on the ground” effort may be necessary here. These may include posting at local non-profit job boards, with women-led groups, at ethnic group events, or attending job fairs at local colleges/universities. There is a plethora of different resources out there for you to use if you tap into the local network, like ICR Iowa Connect with the public relations contact associated with these organizations and build a partnership of referrals and work with a recruiting partner to tap into their robust networking connections! The sky is the limit if someone is willing to look up!  

Step Five: Interviewing 

The hard work doesn’t stop after simply posting in a variety of places. In fact, the most difficult part comes next: assessing, addressing, and controlling our own implicit biases during screenings and interviews. Would you disqualify someone for a customer service role if there is a typo on their resume? Have you ever assumed an accommodation cannot be made for someone with a physical disability, such as blindness? Or perhaps you write in your notes that a candidate said “axed” instead of “asked” during an interview. These are the little practices or habits that we need to take a deeper look at. Do they disqualify the person? Not necessarily. Perfect spelling might not be necessary for a call center representative who speaks on the phone all day. Many times, accommodations can be made for individuals with physical disabilities allowing them to successfully perform the essential job duties of a position. And someone’s dialect , even saying “y’all”, is not enough to disqualify a candidate in most circumstances.  

In the end, employers and hiring managers need to navigate through the irrelevant information and determine if someone is qualified or not based on the core competencies of the position. To learn more about any potential implicit biases, Project Implicit has free resources where you can test to see if you have any implicit bias for a variety of protected classes such as weight, disability, skin-tone, religious affiliation, etc.  

Step Six: Candidate Selection 

The interviews have been completed and you have notes upon notes of objective information on each of your interviewees. How do you decide between your top contenders? Rather than using “who would I rather drink a beer with” as a tie-breaker, this may be your chance to actually take action in diversifying your workforce!   

Selecting the more diverse, or less homogeneous applicant, contributes to new perspectives, less group-think, and more creativity. And really, this makes a lot of sense! If everyone who worked at one organization were all white females, in their 30’s, who went to the same university and all grew up in the same town, how many differing perspectives could there really be? All these individuals had similar education, preferences, upbringing, etc. But when we create a team inclusive of all ages, genders, education-levels, and experiences, now we are getting differing perspectives and new ideas at the table.  The more well-rounded a team, the more interesting the proposed solutions become! We just need to be sure our ears are open, and I mean truly open to listening.   

Another quick tip on candidate selection? Don’t throw away your applications, interview notes, or demographic information just yet! These should be saved for at least one year so your recruiting efforts are well documented. If all was objective and fair, there should be nothing to hide. This information is also needed to crunch the numbers for your next AAP.  

Step Seven: Retention 

When we recruit for diversity, equity, and inclusion, it is not just about getting the right people in the door, it is about keeping them as well. When another position opens up, this process starts all over again! Be sure to stay objective as you select employees for internal promotions, as well as filling entry-level positions externally. When individuals are provided with a path for growth measured by reaching certain milestones, employers are more likely to retain and promote individuals in-house. Are you making all open positions available internally before externally? Is there perhaps a Succession Plan for the leaders of the organization? Everyone in the organization who is performing well should have the same access to growth and training opportunities as their peers. 

Consider that employees from all different backgrounds may appreciate a variety of benefits, rather than simply the traditional benefit package, such as health, dental, and vision. If there are many mothers and fathers at the workplace for example, flexible schedules may be a maker or breaker, or even company-sponsored life insurance! As a part of your recruiting and retention strategy, find out what benefits are most attractive to diverse candidates and meet them where they’re at.  

There are many things employers can do to diversify their applicants. Remove those weed-out requirements, make your open positions more available, objectively recruit for the best candidate, create equal chances to succeed, and include those that may be different from us. In this article, we reviewed seven different topics, but simply reading about it will not change your workforce. If your organization wants a helping hand in recruiting, developing a recruiting strategy, creating an Affirmative Action Plan, running background checks, or writing policies, Skywalk Group Human Resources Consultants are ready to help with the tools and templates you need! For more information, reach out to me at hr@skywalkgroup.com or use the Contact Us form. 

By Samantha Rogers