The shift towards bringing diversity to your workplace is a new and emerging concept. Employers and recruiters are making an effort to hire diverse candidates. In this post, I will be talking about how organizations can effectively manage diversity in the workplace.

Curious to know? Here is what I have for you.

Definition of Diversity in the Workplace 

If you are looking at having a diverse workplace, you must understand what workplace diversity means. It refers to having different individuals in your organization. Diversity can be defined by how individuals identify and perceive themselves. It can be determined on a variety of factors such as gender, age, race, religion, citizenship, ethnic groups, and other distinct differences.

Let's See What the Benefits of Having Diversity in the Workplace Are.

The organizations which are focused on hiring a diverse workforce have a large pool of applicants to choose from. This will reduce the time spent in finding and filling vacant positions. Those who do not hire candidates from diverse talent pools often miss out qualified candidates. As a result, employers and recruiters have a tough time to fill essential roles, which increases the cost of recruitment.

If you have a diverse workforce with different linguistic and culture, it will help your organization to expand its business nationally, internationally, regional, and in local markets as well.

Benefits:

• Better customer satisfaction by improving the way employees interact with more diverse clients.
• Diversification in employees’ background brings creative ideas and perspectives.
• Organizations can understand the target demographics and culture effectively.

Now the question is: How Can an Organization Bring Diversity in their Recruitment Process?

Let's go through these points and check out how you can manage diversity in your workplace.

Auditing the Current Hiring Process: To begin with, it is important to assess if your hiring process is already geared up towards adding diversity to the workplace. Identify if there are any discrepancies or bottlenecks in the process and look for solutions. Analyze the strengths and weaknesses of your diversity hiring and make a plan of the required actions.

Set a Target: Choose a metric for your diversity hiring. For example, set a target of increasing the percentage of female employees to your workforce by 10%. This will act as a criterion to plan your diversity hiring strategy.

Candidate Sourcing: Keeping the following points in mind, you can bring diverse candidates right from the first step of recruitment.

a. Job Description: Job posting plays an essential role in attracting the top, diverse talent. Use simple language, define proper role and responsibilities, avoid using ‘masculine-type’ words to attract female candidates. 

b. Provide Flexible Workplace: It includes the willingness and ability to change according to the circumstances. Flexible working hours will help in attracting the pool of talent and increase the productivity of the organization.

c. Referrals: Your social networks consist of people who share the same demographic with you. While hiring minority employees, referrals become an effective method.

Diversity in Candidate Screening: Screening is all about matching the job requirement and qualification of a candidate for the applied post. To introduce diversity in candidate screening, AI can play a vital role by analyzing the existing resume database to identify which candidate is suitable and can move up to become a successful employee.

       I know we all agree that technology is now an essential part of every industry.

       Automation is also contributing to achieving better results.

      Imagine what would happen if your recruitment process eliminates bias by using AI tools.

      You might be wondering how.

AI tools can help eliminate bias. For example, a resume parser extracts data from the candidates’ resume and makes the information available in data fields. With the help of its configuration feature, you can identify the data fields and have the option to enable/disable the fields according to your requirement. Once you disable fields, our parser will not bring data for the same. Thus, you can create a pool of diverse talents and hire those candidates who are worth the job.

AI software can also enrich the candidate's resume by using data for the verification of previous work and even from their social media profiles. This will remove the concept of blind hiring, where you have to traditionally cross out the fields like gender, name, etc., and putting back in the system. It is a manual process which consumes time and includes biases.

Analyze Your Diversity Results: Once you implement this process, take a look back and check if you have achieved your goal. If you are not successful, try to find out more strategies which can bring desired results.

Diversity hiring is a wonderful concept which ensures that your recruitment process stays free from any bias. After all, encouraging diversity in your workplace is a step forward towards modernization.