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Digital tools can help ensure a diverse talent pool when recruiting and hiring.
There’s no doubt that a diverse team makes a company stronger. But finding the right pool of candidates can be challenging. Subconscious bias during resume review can be one stumbling block when it comes to diversity in hiring, but how you write job descriptions can impact the candidates who apply.
The good news is that technology is here to help. From primary-skills recommendations to artificial intelligence (AI) resume review, a diverse talent pool is closer than you think.
Removing bias from the hiring process can be challenging. Corporations have tried to combat subconscious bias by creating diversity training programs. Still, critics and some studies say that traditional diversity training is the least effective means of removing bias from hiring.
Thankfully, technology offers several solutions to help remove bias — at least from the initial application. Many of these tools allow hiring managers to focus on a candidate’s skills instead of their name or demographic information. Consider the following three types of tools that can help improve your hiring and recruitment process by ramping up diversity.
Several applications allow companies to find candidates based solely on skills, helping remove subconscious bias from the hiring process. Here are a few examples:
Blind reviews can remove the temptation to make assumptions about candidates’ demographics based on names and other identifying characteristics and let their in-demand career skills shine through as the most essential piece of their resume. Here are two examples:
Resume review isn’t the only place where bias can enter the hiring process. Even how a job description is written can influence who applies. For example, using words that appeal to a more masculine audience — like “challenging” or “aggressive” — can skew your applicant pool.
Thanks to predictive analytics and plenty of examples of successful and unsuccessful postings, you can adjust your job descriptions to encourage a more diverse pool of candidates to apply.
For example, Textio reviews job postings for gender or culture bias. The platform reviews more than 10 million job posts a month, as well as their outcomes and uses that data to improve its algorithms. It then suggests ways to change the wording of your post to achieve better results.
Tech tools can help businesses expand their candidate pools and recruit a talented, diverse workforce. However, diversity hiring technology can be supplemented with additional strategies to ensure a positive company culture all job seekers and current employees will appreciate. Consider the following ideas:
Making the most of your technology and working collaboratively on the hiring process will help you create more diverse hiring practices. And a more diverse team, of course, is a more effective one.
Unfortunately, bias has long been prevalent during the hiring and recruitment process, especially when it comes to reviewing resumes and is still an issue. A candidate’s name or location can affect whether or not they’ll be chosen for an interview. Consider the following research:
Skills-based hiring has increasingly become a popular way to combat this kind of bias. According to a TestGorilla survey of 1,500 employers and 1,500 employees, 70 percent of respondents said all forms of skills-based hiring are more effective than reviewing resumes. Many employers report using skills-based hiring to improve diversity. Eighty-four percent of survey respondents said skills-based hiring positively impacted diversity and 23 percent said it had a very large impact.
While technology is an excellent tool to increase diversity in your talent pool, there’s no substitute for committing to diversity as a core value for your organization. As a leader, you should consider incorporating a diversity, equity and inclusion section into your company policies or mission statement. Talk to hiring managers and team leaders to let them know they should make diversity a priority when it comes to hiring.
Diversity initiatives shouldn’t stop after new employee onboarding. Ensure your company provides a welcoming environment for people from all cultures, faiths and backgrounds and prioritize inclusive communication efforts. When your team members feel comfortable bringing their whole selves to work, they’ll be able to focus on contributing to company goals better.
Dawn Kuczwara and Max Freedman contributed to this article.