8 Practical Ways to Improve Hiring Diversity
With a University of Sydney study recently showing that discrimination in recruitment Australia is shockingly widespread, now more than ever organisations need to implement real, tangible change in their hiring practices to move to a fairer hiring environment.
At least externally, a lot of organisations seem to be interested in promoting diversity in hiring, but shoot themselves in the foot when it comes to how they actually do their hiring.
So, here’s 8 quick, practical tips to promote diversity in your hiring process immediately.
1. Minimise reliance on referrals
Using your current team to source candidates is likely to lead to hiring more of the same.
Try sourcing candidates through job boards like Indeed, Seek & LinkedIn that allow anyone to apply. This helps put an end to the old boy’s club.
2. Run a structured hiring process
Unstructured processes and interviews, where nothing is measured and the goalposts are moved as you go long, inevitably opens up room for bias and discrimination. If nothing is measured, it’s very easy to arbitrarily reject the best candidate because it’s not an evidence-based approach.
Make sure each candidate is treated equally and is afforded the same opportunity by running a structured process.
3. Avoid the weird obsessing on cultural fit
Ask yourself the simple question, how are you going to attract more diverse candidates by forcing everyone to 'fit in' with your current culture? Talent teams have to mature from the cultural fit craze of the last ten years.
Try moving to skills-based hiring instead.
4. Get rid of CVs
CVs reveal someone's gender, age, ethnicity, religion and other sensitive facts. The sad fact is, if you apply to a role in Australia with Chinese first and last names, you only have ⅓ the chance of a callback compared to applying with white first and last names. This is wrong.
Instead of using CVs to screen candidates, why not try skills-based screening instead?
5. Publish the salary on the job
Pay transparency helps to level the playing field. If the salary is known to everyone, then nobody can be low-balled, and we can escape the cycle of marginalised groups having systemically lower pay.
In fact, the UK government recently launched a pilot scheme which required participating companies to list the salary on the job ad.
Transparency is a key component of ethical hiring.
6. Ban asking for current salary information
Basing how much you are going to pay someone based on what they currently earn is only going to perpetuate any systemic underpayment that's in place.
The same UK pilot scheme above also required that companies not ask about the candidate's current salary during the interview. A recent Alooba LinkedIn poll showed 72% of people would be in support of this.
7. Adopt structured interviews
Ad hoc, unstructured interviews are open to a lot of bias which might be excluding your more diverse candidates. Check out our best practice guide on running structured interviews, where every candidate is treated the same, given the same chance and measured in a consistent way.
8. Reduce the reliance on interviews
"Tall, good looking, extroverted people tend to do a lot better in interviews than short, ugly, introverted people...so not only are interviews tremendously biased, they don't predict performance in the long run."
Hear from leading psychologists on why interviews are not the best selection method.
Instead of relying on interviews as your selection tool, try measuring things that actually predict performance, like skills, intelligence and personality.
