Presented by hireEZ
If every dark cloud has a silver lining, a heightened awareness of social injustice would reinvigorate companies’ commitment to DE&I.
hireEZ saw this priority shift firsthand with a 250% increase in diversity searches on our platform and DE&I initiatives becoming the single biggest budget priority for talent teams in 2021.
While these metrics suggest that workplace equality is heading in a positive direction, a deeper dive into workplace statistics, like women’s participation in the workforce dropping to an all-time low, tell a different story. Even a 250% increase in diversity searches masks how industries, like tech, with an existing gender disparity, only saw users search for underrepresented talent on 15% of searches.
The most significant issue facing diversity hiring might seem like an inability to find talent. Yet, nearly 50% of talent professionals surveyed in December 2021 claimed to lack insights to inform their hiring team where diversity needs to be addressed.
To avoid haphazard and futile diversity hiring efforts, companies will first have to understand where the gaps in their organization exist with regard to DE&I. Then, executives and leaders will need to support their teams with the appropriate financial and technological resources to strategize searches based on the market, execute effective engagement, and monitor progress towards workplace inclusion and equality.
Dissecting the disconnect
For organizations to achieve workplace equality, they need to understand where underrepresented talent is needed in their workforce. Unfortunately, only 22% of talent professionals measure the success of their DE&I initiatives based on the ratio of underrepresented talent in their organization based on a hireEZ survey.
Paired with half of the teams not having insights on workplace diversity, those making efforts to hire underrepresented talent are doing so without proper visibility of where diversity gaps need to be filled.
These gaps extend in a few areas:
The organization
Whether it’s a lack of collaboration with HR or accessibility to data, talent teams often struggle to successfully understand where the diversity gaps in their organization exist. Even when gap analysis occurs, teams tend to overlook assessing each department and position level. For example, you might analyze your sales team and determine that you have a deficiency of entry-level women sales representatives. While the initial inclination will be to hire for entry-level roles, you might not realize those disparities exist in upper-level positions if they are not assessed, as well.
With a better understanding of existing gaps and how big those gaps are in different departments and levels, your team can place priority on hiring underrepresented talent across all areas.
Talent attraction
Whether it’s job postings or outreach, talent professionals often fail to monitor how neurodiverse, ethnic minorities, and others are interacting with their organization and open positions. This could be something as simple as checking response rates on email outreach from different team members to see which one garnered the best results or conducting research on the appropriate language to use in job postings when targeting a specific group, like military terminology that’s familiar to veterans and will help them identify jobs based on their skills.
The talent market
Beyond one’s organization, gaps also need to be identified in the talent market during outbound recruitment research. Hiring teams may be running search parameters that exclude diverse talent or focus on areas where the volume of that talent is minimal. In a talent landscape where competition and talent shortages are high, talent market visibility is crucial.
Closing the gaps
Once organizations are able to identify gaps in those three areas, they can leverage that information to close those gaps with AI-driven talent acquisition.
The organization
With data on hand regarding organizational diversity gaps, teams need to tailor their searches for specific underrepresented groups. AI-driven talent acquisition platforms like hireEZ provide 45+ open web platforms, diversity search filters, and keywords for targeting groups, like neurodiverse talent, to uncover talent that may be otherwise hidden.
Talent attraction
Enterprise companies, like JP Morgan Chase and Google Cloud, have recognized this issue and invested in employee groups and resources to ensure that they’re not overlooking these underutilized groups. More organizations need to make similar investments and efforts to do the same.
Recently, talent teams have found ways to combine automation and personalization, which is a valuable combo for addressing talent attraction gaps. This includes creating pre-built templates for outreach that are customizable and personalized based on the group one is trying to reach. This can also include crafting an email with a speech function or video component for those that have trouble reading.
The talent market
With talent market visibility a major priority, resources like hireEZ’s Market Insights allow teams to access real-time talent market data to uncover how the underrepresented talent market looks based on industries, locations, and more with additional insights on average market value and rate of job movement. With this data on hand, teams are able to seamlessly transition into searches.
Keeping track of success
While aligning priorities to address gaps is a crucial first step, it’s important that organizations remain accountable for how their strategies and efforts are helping them achieve hiring goals.
Similar to the lack of data most talent teams have on the diversity makeup of their organization, the rush to hire keeps many teams from taking the time to measure the progress from their efforts. Without expending too much time, teams can automatically track diversity hiring analytics, including:
- How underrepresented talent are being sourced by team members, their qualification rate, and more
- How underrepresented talent are responding to outreach from the team
With all of this information available in easily accessible reports, teams are accountable for their progress and can show executives the benefits of their DE&I investments. By doing so, organizations will be even more committed to spending resources on hiring underrepresented talent and prioritizing inclusivity.
Steven Jiang is Co-founder/CEO of hireEZ.
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