With diversity becoming more and more of a company focus point, it’s important for companies to understand that to have true success the process begins in recruiting. Diversifying your recruitment strategy and process will allow you to effect large scale change within your company. There are many different reasons to diversify teams within your organization, but the biggest reason is simple; performance.
Team members from the same background and educations will consistently come up with similar solutions to problems. Team members who come from different backgrounds are much more likely to produce a variety of ideas when discussing problems simply by bouncing ideas off someone who does not have the same shared experiences, working style, or educational background. Increasing this type of creativity allows companies to increase production by finding those outside the box solutions to complex problems.
There are a few different ways to change up your recruitment process in order to foster this type of environment. The first step to this type of change within recruitment will start with getting rid of your “boilerplate” job description. For years companies have standardized their job descriptions in order to prevent discrimination and nepotism, but it seems that now it has developed a culture within companies where everyone has the same background, ideas and is stunting organizational creativity. By setting up hard requirements within education or years of experience we just might be eliminating the right candidate before we even get the chance to hear what they have to say. Searching for various skill sets might be a more viable approach than searching for background and education. [optinlocker]
Searching for various skill sets will also allow you to expand your search. If you are searching for strict keywords from a job description you are likely going to narrow your field of candidates. Searching for various skill sets should also take you to a variety of different sources which in turn will also increase the diversity within your candidate pool.
One additional step for adding diversity via the recruitment process is known as blind recruitment. Blind recruitment is the process of removing all identifiable education from a candidate’s resume. Within this practice the candidate’s name, age, gender, education and sometimes even years of experience are removed from the resume. This allows recruiters to focus on various skill sets when trying to identify the proper candidate for open positions within an organization.
By setting up new recruitment strategies a company can begin to diversify its recruitment process and in turn diversify its workforce. With proper diversification, the development of creative solutions should begin to allow a company to see new levels of growth.
By Peter Pabon | People Science Sr. Talent Advisor [/optinlocker]