Enhancing Your Company’s DEI Strategy

In 2022 talent teams are no longer ignoring the importance of building a DEI workplace. Many recruitment and HR teams are now allocating a lot of resources and time to DEI, as well as increasing budgets to expand their efforts.

So how can your company expand its DEI initiative?

The Correct Significant Steps

Your business can take steps towards achieving a DEI workplace by measuring key metrics and analysing areas of improvement as and when changes are made.

How to do this:

Diverse candidate pool: To achieve a more diverse candidate pool you should be writing more inclusive job descriptions in order to attract a wide variety of candidates.
Know your existing workforce: To help you measure diversity in your existing talent base, you need to analyse the demographics in your business.
Inclusive Content: Create content for your social media channels and career website to showcase your employees’ stories within the business. By creating this type of content, you’ll be able to show how employees from a wide range of backgrounds, different ethnicities, genders and abilities feel like they belong. Make sure you track the data related to your posts. Analyse which type of messaging works best with your audience, which types of posts get the most interaction, and adapt your social media efforts towards the type of content that your audience wants to see more of.

Don’t Get Stuck on the “Ideal Candidate”

Many recruitment and HR professionals can get stuck on the idea of the “ideal candidate”. However, this type of mindset can limit your business. You won’t have a diverse talent pool to choose from if you have a long list of essential requirements especially since a lot of the times some of them may not be essential skills to have to do the role. Looking for a candidate that ticks all of the boxes will take up a lot of time which can mean you’re missing out on some incredible talent.

Diversifying Your Talent Pool

Candidates are looking for a business that has a DEI culture nowadays. Ensure that you aren’t limiting your access to amazing talent by asking for specific skills that aren’t dealbreakers. You can build programs that engage and attract historically marginalised communities through some strategic audience planning.

To develop their networks and to be able to source diverse candidates, talent teams can do so in the following ways:

Social Media interaction: keeping in touch with passive talent, potential candidates and previous candidates on social media is important. Make sure you showcase what is happening within your company, answer questions, post job openings, tell your employees’ stories. This will tell your organisation’s story and promote you as an attractive employer of choice.
Collaborate with local organisations: You can contact local diversity groups and collaborate with them on sourcing candidates for open positions. You can help your long-term network growth by building and maintaining relationships with organisations such as these.
Recruitment events: Both in-person and virtual recruitment events can be great places to help build a talent network, especially those centred around diversity.

Leverage DEI initiative enhancing tools

AI tools and Automation ones can also help enhance your DEI initiatives. They can do so by streamlining your hiring process and getting rid of manual tasks.

AI skill-matching: Automatically screen applicants for role requirements with skill matching AI. These tools can be particularly helpful for tech roles, however be careful not to fall into the “ideal candidate” trap as you will be missing out due to an impossibly long list of requirements. You can also integrate this skill-matching tool with an applicant tracking system. This can eliminate the strain of managing multiple candidate databases in various places and helps find qualified candidates faster. You can also reduce bias in your hiring process by leveraging this type of technology.
Automated Intelligent Sourcing: Finding the right candidates is the most time-consuming process. If you employ the use of AIS you’ll be able to reach top talent while keeping the candidate pool diverse, and also help you find candidates that fit the roles and invite them to apply.

No Time Like The Present to Invest in DEI

Your business shouldn’t wait to prioritise DEI. If you are an employer that focuses on DEI you’ll be sought by more qualified candidates, which will result in a more successful and profitable business.

DEI isn’t just a cash investment, if you invest time in telling your business’ story, aligning your teams, and setting expectations you’ll get high return on investment.