How to Create a Diversity Recruitment Plan

Creating a diverse workplace is a goal for many organizations this year—and for good reason. From a financial standpoint, according to a survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers, 85% of CEOs report that implementing a diversity and inclusiveness strategy into their organizations has increased earnings. Additionally, diverse workplaces have employees that are happier and more productive, which goes a long way toward boosting the ability to attract quality talent while reducing turnover. 

Although there are clearly great reasons to make an organization more diverse, this is not possible without a solid strategy in place to make it a reality. By creating a diversity recruitment plan, organizations have a roadmap on how they will accomplish bringing in more workers from underrepresented backgrounds, as well as a way to hold themselves accountable for meeting these goals. Continue reading to find out how to create an effective diversity recruitment plan.

What Is a Diversity Recruitment Strategy?

A diversity recruitment strategy is a blueprint that recruiters can use to outline a company’s diversity goals and the actionable steps that will help achieve them. With a concrete strategy in place, recruiters can monitor how well they’re doing in recruiting from untapped communities and make changes to their approach if they’re not meeting their targets. 

Why Is It Important to Have a Diversity Recruiting Strategy?

A diversity recruiting strategy is important to have because it gives a company concrete steps that it can use to make its organization more diverse. This is necessary because making a workplace more diverse is not always easy to do in practice, no matter how good people’s intentions are. Recruiters need to have a strategy to hold themselves accountable for bringing in more historically excluded workers—and that means having specific goals in mind, tracking their results, and changing course as needed.

How to Create Actionable Steps to Plan Your Diversity Recruiting

Once recruiters have outlined the goals they have for increasing their company’s diversity, it’s time to come up with ways to reach those goals. However, in order to create these actionable steps, recruiters should first consider the following things:

• - How does the organization define diversity? 

Diversity can mean different things in different organizations. For one company, it may mean bringing on more employees from different racial and cultural backgrounds, but for another, it may mean addressing a gender imbalance within the organization. Before creating a diversity plan, recruiters must define what diversity means and think about the type of talent they want to attract to make their company more diverse.

• - Do hiring managers recognize unconscious biases? 

Everyone knows what overt discrimination is, but hiring managers may not be aware that their own unconscious biases can actually hinder their organization’s diversity goals. There are several kinds of biases that can creep into the hiring process without people even knowing it. These include pedigree bias, which is the preference to hire those who have “elite” qualifications or connections, and confirmation bias, which is the tendency to seek out information about a candidate that reinforces preconceived notions about a group they are a member of. In order to be successful with increasing diversity, it’s important for everyone in an organization to understand the effects of bias and then implement strategies to combat it.

• - Do company policies support diversity and inclusion? 

An organization can hire untapped employees, but if it doesn’t have policies and practices that nurture them when they get there, those workers will search for a company that better supports them. A company that doesn’t have policies in place to encourage diversity can begin by offering flexible work schedules that allow employees to take time off to celebrate different religious holidays or participate in cultural events. Also, policies can address professional development opportunities, promotions, company transfers, compensation, benefits, and termination in order to make the work environment more equitable.

Need more help developing your diversity strategist? Download our diversity hiring playbook to drive equitable hiring across every candidate touchpoint.

Measuring the Success of Recruiting Strategies

After recruiters have created strategies for their diversity recruitment plan, it’s imperative for them to measure their results so they know if they’re actually meeting their goals. When determining how successful their efforts have been, companies should review these metrics: the amount of time it takes to fill positions, how much it costs to fill them, the percentage of historically underrepresented talent that was chosen for interviews, the percentage of people from untapped backgrounds that were given job offers, and the turnover rate of diverse hires in the last year.

Taking steps toward becoming a more diverse organization is a noble cause, but companies must have a concrete plan to make that happen. By drafting a diversity recruitment plan, organizations can create tangible strategies that can be implemented, monitored, and updated in real-time in order to reach their goals.