Building Diversity, Inclusion & Equity (DEI) into your Hiring Strategy

It’s effective to review your hiring strategy often. A successful hiring strategy should be as effective as possible each time you go out to market so you can ultimately find the best talent available. When doing so, growing your hiring strategy should also implement diversity, equity and inclusion in its approach. 

Why is diversity, inclusion and equity important in hiring strategy?

• Attract wider pools of candidates and access further talent without candidates facing barriers.
• It can lead to further innovation and success. Hiring more diverse teams can unlock new and creative ideas, fostering better decision making.
• Build a more positive employee culture, where a greater sense of belonging is experienced by employees; leading to higher staff retention rates.
• Investors are placing a higher importance in understanding what organisations are actively doing towards diversity, inclusion and equity initiatives. 

Understanding DEI when attracting candidates

Before looking at your hiring strategy, your organisation must foster a culture that understands and practices the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion. This can actively attract new candidates without even going out to market, reflecting overall growth and adaptiveness as a company.

Inclusive policies 

There must be policies that reflect the importance of diversity, inclusion and equity, showing a commitment to change and development. An effective policy must acknowledge your organisation as welcoming, discrimination-free as well as forward thinking. 

Some policies may include:

• Anti-Discrimination
• Flexible Working
• Maternity & Paternity Leave

Partnerships

There are many charities, not-for-profit and government-funded organisations that can help with DEI growth. By partnering with these organisations can help not only educate the overall company and ensure the right initiatives are in place going forward, whilst implementing a stronger workforce environment that can actively make an impact in the sector.

For example, Gravitas is one of seven co-founders for Programme One, a collaborative partnership to address the underrepresentation of Black recruiters in the recruitment sector. 

Events

Like partnerships, actively seeking the value of DEI initiatives can be shown through events. Whether this be an independent webinar, sponsoring an event or collaborating in a partnership event, these events can help address issues and educate the industry, and even attract potential new talent to your organisation. 

Leadership

With DEI being at the core of your hiring strategy, the leadership team must also see the value in it and feel confident as representatives. Introducing insightful training, workshops and coaching can help with DEI conversations, inclusive interviewing and even recognising unconscious bias during the hiring process. 

DEI in the hiring process

During the hiring process, there are various actions to put into place so the process is fair and inclusive.

Job description

When the job description is being created for the role, it's likely there will be characteristics that point towards the ideal candidate. However, certain characteristics may be attributed to gender bias. For example, some male coded words can include ‘lead’, ‘driven’ and ‘aggressive’. Some female coded words may look at ‘trustworthy’ or ‘empathetic’. Unfortunately, gendered job descriptions alter perception of what the role involves, which can lower job appeal and the likelihood to even apply.

Explore how you can make your job specifications gender neutral, inviting diverse candidates to apply.  You can access useful gender decoders such as Kat Matfield’s Gender Decoder.

Alongside this, you can add a disclaimer that if someone doesn’t have every essential skill, for them to still apply. A commonly known statistic is that “Men apply for a job when they meet only 60% of the qualifications, but women apply only if they meet 100% of them”. Using this disclaimer removes this barrier for anyone who may doubt themself.
 
Promoting your vacancy

When you are exploring where to promote your live vacancy, consider how you can make the approach more diverse. There is a selection of diverse job boards you can use to promote your job roles including:

1. Diverse Jobs Matter
2. Investing in Women

There may even be local community groups or forums where you can advertise your jobs. 

If you have a referral scheme, make sure this is advertised in the right way. It's likely that referrals will find similar candidates to existing employees in your organisation, reducing opportunities for diversity. 

Reasonable adjustments

During the application and interview process, it's important to address if candidates require any reasonable adjustments. Reasonable adjustments recognise that different people have different needs to feel comfortable during the hiring process.

For example, if the interviewee is neurodivergent, having a visual prompt during the interview of the question may make the interviewee feel more confident in answering the question. As well as this, if a candidate have a visual impairment or blindness, they may require a video magnifier tool or screen reader. 

By asking if someone needs support, it normalises this as a standard practice within the hiring process.

Interview panel

It is important for an interview panel to represent the organisation well, and often will indicate to a candidate as to how it will be like working at your company. Having a diverse interview panel can give the best account of your organisation, which can make a candidate feel more comfortable or even relate / find common experience with an interview. As well as this, a diverse interview panel reduces bias across decision making when appointing a candidate.

As well as this, having interview training for the panel to be aware of unconscious bias whilst interviewing. 

Key takeaways within this blog

• The first step to consider if how DEI might already look like in your organisation. Ensuring the right policies are in place and that you are proactively have the best initiatives can reflect how meaningful it is to have hiring strategies that includes DEI.
• Explore how you can consider DEI actively in the hiring process, from creating gender-neutral job descriptions, using a diverse interview panel and asking if candidates may require reasonable adjustments can make all the difference in widening access to talent and reducing barriers.

About Gravitas

Gravitas Recruitment Group are an international recruitment agency, providing hiring services in the Insurance, Technology and Banking sector. Our high-quality hiring solutions and a commitment to a positive work culture has led Gravitas to win Recruitment Company of the Year ASPCo in 2023, with recognition to our dedication to DEI.

Explore how we can help you with your hiring.

About the author

Jennine Gibbs has over 20 years’ experience in recruitment, training and people development, joining Gravitas in 2022. Jennine has had a huge impact on how Gravitas creates a sense of wellbeing and belonging, through her roles as People Business Partner, supporting across career development, coaching as well as DEI initiatives. She also heads up our DEI committee and Programme One partnership.