You know that diversity and inclusion (D&I) are powerhouses for your business, so it’s critical that you develop an effective diversity & inclusion recruiting strategy. The U.S workforce has evolved to become increasingly diverse. In the 40 years between 1980 and 2020, the white working-age population has decreased from 83% of the nation’s total to 63%, while the number of minority workers will have doubled.

Having a diverse team helps companies drive innovation, creativity, and ultimately to achieve better results. It’s time to get more unique and diverse workers into your talent pipeline.

Let the stats speak for themselves:

  • Companies with diverse management teams generate 19% more revenue
  • Companies of diversity are 1.7 times more likely to be top innovative leaders in their market segments
  • 85% of CEOs say having a diverse workforce increased profits

If you haven’t already, it’s time to build a diversity & inclusion recruiting program. Not sure how to get started? We built the checklist below to get you started toward strengthening your recruiting efforts:

✓ Define goals
It will be difficult to create a recruiting strategy without defining your goals. To find the missing piece to your puzzle you will need to identify your goals and determine the exact metrics. Start by brainstorming your current strengths and weaknesses. This will help you evaluate where changes need to be made and how you can build on your strengths and make changes to improve your weaknesses. Having action-oriented goals will allow you to form a baseline for a recruiting strategy that attracts a diverse pool of applicants.

✓ Train your search committee
Having a properly trained recruiting committee will enhance your search process. Start by teaching and training them on topics such as the value of D&I and the impact of unconscious bias in candidate selection. It’s crucial that your search committee has every aspect of diversity top of mind.

✓ Eliminate all recruiting bias
Identify where the biases exist in your hiring process. Check all stages of your recruiting efforts such as sources, screens, interviews, and hiring decisions. Analyze your findings and make plans to become a more inclusive organization. Using blind resumes, blind interviews, and harnessing AI to review resumes are all great ways to effectively remove bias.

✓ Expand your network
Look beyond your comfort zone when looking for candidates. To seek and hire diverse candidates you need to be open to using different sources and not just rely on the norm. Using sources you know best will result in cookie-cutter talent. To find diverse candidates you need to go where they congregate. Try online and offline groups dedicated to people of diverse backgrounds. Look for candidates at different universities and review resumes on more than one job site.

✓ Craft effective job descriptions
If you want to target a certain audience with job ads, you need to make sure your job descriptions are geared towards the specific demographic. Audit your job ads and make sure they are written to be more inclusive so they appeal to candidates from all backgrounds.

✓ Enhance your referral program
One of the best recruiting sources is your employees. Diverse employees know and talk to other diverse individuals seeking jobs. If you have a fantastic work environment/culture your employees are without a doubt sharing that information with others. So why not get them involved?

Take advantage of this. Employees are eager to help and feel of value. Create or enhance your current employee referral program by using your employee’s network to attract and retain more diverse workers to boost your diversity recruitment strategy.

✓ Review the process
Track the process. What gets measured gets done! If you have clearly defined goals and metrics it will be easy to measure your diversity recruiting success. Companies that continuously work on tracking and measuring diversity will see the positive impact and outcome.

Diversity doesn’t just happen on its own. If you actively follow this checklist your company will be off to a great start to attract and retain the talent your organization needs to be successful.