Top eight inclusive hiring practices for a diverse workforce

Inclusive hiring practices are vital for business success as they resonate with the diverse modern-day workforce. Employees with varied experiences in a team improve collaboration and work creatively to solve problems. This diversity in experience, mindset, and problem-solving adds unique value to the organization.

An inclusive recruitment strategy makes employees from different backgrounds feel supported and appreciated, which becomes the key to high employee retention, improved morale, and better business success.

Inclusive workplaces make employees feel accepted and valued, resulting in greater employee satisfaction and retention. Appreciating unique employee characteristics inspires them to commit to long-term company goals. Hence, companies promoting workplace inclusion create a positive brand image.

Inclusivity is the foundation of a diverse workforce, which helps bring a variety of perspectives to the team. This allows catering to clients from different backgrounds, securing opportunities to access new markets and business verticals. When employees with diverse backgrounds and characteristics work in a team, they utilize their varied interpersonal, technical, and transferable skills and experiences to find creative solutions and promote innovation.

From a sustainability and growth perspective, inclusive hiring strategies support organizational success in the future. It helps to globally hire people from different backgrounds with varied ideas and perspectives that prepare the organization for future challenges.

Organizations should focus on factors, such as generational differences, neurodiversity, ability, and veteran status, along with gender and race, for inclusive hiring. Defining clear policies related to these factors helps overcome hiring biases and ensure workforce inclusivity.

Hiring companies should prepare job descriptions using inclusive language, avoiding gender bias, industry jargon, and any preference indications. Using simple words and eliminating masculine or feminine words from the job posting help offer an inclusive feel to the job description.

Additionally, hiring managers can use shorter sentences, brief paragraphs, large font sizes, and bold text to emphasize key points for candidates with visual problems or dyslexia. Finally, the emphasis should be on job responsibilities rather than requirements.

Ensure that the language used on the website is inclusive. For example,

• Avoiding gender-specific or education-specific terms.
• Highlighting the organization’s compliance with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) guidelines.
• Using dyslexia-friendly fonts and relevant content forms, such as videos and downloadable information sheets.
• Complying with accessibility standards, using the right color contrast, video, and audio files.

Adding video transcripts and close captions, and alternative texts to images.

Adhering to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

Many candidates check print ads, attend virtual job fairs, conduct social media searches, and access online job ads to find relevant job roles. Hiring managers should widely advertise a job position to increase outreach to a diverse population.

Having a diverse interview panel can help the hiring team develop a well-rounded perspective of candidates and evaluate them without bias. Even if there’s no time to strategize and form a panel, identifying skilled and knowledgeable team members with different perspectives and thought processes might be beneficial.

Internal mobility strategy allowing both vertical and horizontal movement improves workplace inclusiveness. This is because internal mobility across various job roles and groups without bias helps offer equal career development and mentorship opportunities.

Mercer | Mettl’s organizational development program helps find the right employees within the company. Assessments like High-Potential Identification, Succession Planning, Leadership Development, and Virtual ADCs use an unbiased and scientific method to assess employees.

Recruitment technologies can help in inclusive hiring, helping reduce bias and ensuring objective decisions. For example, an applicant tracking system (ATS) is powered by technology that equally measures every candidate’s application regardless of their religion, orientation, or interest.

Measuring the success of an inclusive hiring program involves collecting and tracking human resource data. An ATS can monitor the progress of hired candidates and compare it with the characteristics of candidates who were not selected in the last round.

It is also important to monitor and consider employees’ feedback on inclusiveness and evaluate if every employee receives the same growth opportunities.

Retention rates for every group, such as gender, ethnicity, or disability, are effective in assessing the success of these programs. Low retention rates indicate employees struggle to find a sense of belongingness. High retention rates indicate that diverse hiring improves inclusiveness in the company’s culture, which means employees can ideate, communicate, and collaborate.

Bringing together different experiences, opinions, and values to a shared objective creates positive synergies within an organization. Therefore, developing an inclusive hiring process makes a team that ideates, steps outside their comfort zones, and embraces new perspectives, stimulating innovative approaches.