Diversity Recruitment: 3 Best Practices for Inclusive Hiring
For employers looking to add to their staff, finding people who are a good fit for your company is an important task. Suitable people for the jobs you have available are out there, but in order to find them, you have to be willing to give them a fair chance and evaluate their merits without bias. This may sound like a simple task, but sometimes we’re unintentionally influenced by stereotypes or common assumptions made based on someone’s gender, age, race, religion, or nationality. A mindful employer should avoid these kinds of biases and evaluate each applicant fairly by using diverse, inclusive hiring practices.
The Benefits of Inclusive Hiring
Diversity recruitment, when done right, will help make sure your business has access to as many viewpoints as possible on how to serve your customers. It will also encourage people from a variety of backgrounds to apply to your growing company, giving you the biggest hiring pool possible. Finally, it will make sure your hiring expectations are fair and balanced, so applicants with the proper qualifications won’t be overlooked for things that don’t affect their suitability for the job.
Best Practices for Inclusive Hiring
If you’re looking for a list of diversity recruitment practices, here are several:
- Create a blind hiring process
- Use pre-employment assessment/test assignments
- Structure your interview process
Looking at each of these in detail, creating a blind hiring process means when you accept applications and/or resumes, you have your review team look at the applicants’ experience, job-related skills, and any examples of their work submitted (if the position applied for allows work samples). Exclude things like names, ages, and other personal information not related to the applicants’ work capabilities. This will ensure the applicants are being evaluated based on their qualification for the position.
A pre-employment assessment or test assignment is a trial run for an applicant who seems like they could be a good fit. You provide the most promising applicants with an assignment that the position would normally require of them, then see how they handle it. This may be more challenging for some positions, particularly those that require the applicant to perform a physical task on-site, like wait staff, custodial work, or maintenance work. This will allow you to see the applicant in action and is perhaps the most unbiased way to know if they can do the work you’re looking for.
Finally, structuring your interview process means having a set procedure for interviewing your applicants, including a list of questions to ask. While it’s alright to go “off script” during an interview, the questions provided to your interviewers should be asked at some point and should be the ones used to evaluate the applicant. Having a standard method of evaluation will make it easier to compare results from different applicants and determine which ones are the most suitable for the position. It will also ensure that the line of questioning doesn’t drift too far off topic or into matters irrelevant to an applicant’s suitability due to interviewers having biases or unequal expectations of a given applicant.
Find New Hires and More with Payroll Vault
As your company grows, you need more people, and we at Payroll Vault are eager to help you find the best employees to hire! We’re a payroll service provider that offers more than just payroll and tax filing benefits. Our boutique-style service also includes a variety of human resources solutions that can help you with your hiring process, including job descriptions, employee handbook tools, and background checks. Contact us or visit your nearest Payroll Vault location to learn more about what we can do for your company!
