Implementing Equitable and Inclusive Hiring Practices

Implementing equitable and inclusive hiring practices allows you to improve your diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)—and actually improve it, instead of just relying on tokenism. This is important because it not only makes your company fairer but gives you better results. Implementing equitable and inclusive hiring practices is perfectly doable with the help of some simple steps (and talent acquisition software like Pypa Hire):

Why Does Implementing Equitable and Inclusive Hiring Practices Matter?

You should be considering equitable and inclusive hiring practices as part of creating a fairer and more inclusive workplace and society. However, if you want more to convince you, here’s some tangible reasons to design equitable and inclusive hiring practices:

• Better results: Yes, it’s that simple, diversity improves your ROI because diverse teams perform better (companies in the top quartile for gender diversity make more money than companies at the bottom) because of the creativity diversity brings. 
• Attract top talent: Top candidates want to work in companies that value diversity. (In fact, 70% of candidates want to work at diverse companies). 
• Good PR: Having a company that is known for its diversity will positively impact your brand and employer brand.  

How To Implement Equitable and Inclusive Hiring Practices

By following a series of tips throughout the recruitment process, you can create and implement equitable and inclusive hiring practices your company can be proud of:

Make DEI Initiatives Come From The Top

Any improvement of your hiring practices needs to come from the top, ideally from your CEO and be a key part of your company values. A plan for increasing diversity should be created by senior management or your TA. 

Write Equitable Job Descriptions

The job posting is possibly the most important part of designing equitable and inclusive hiring practices, because, if it fails, it doesn’t matter how good the rest of your process is. But how do you create equitable and inclusive job descriptions?

• Avoid gendered words: Words like “determined” and “rockstar” make a job sound like it’s more suited to men. Just describe what the job is, without using any unrelated adjectives. 
• Remove unnecessary qualifications and criteria: Think about whether someone needs formal qualifications to do the job. Take out requirements like “must lift 50kgs”. Also, arbitrary criteria like “funny” and “team-player” might discourage some candidates. 
• Always include salary ranges: Include salary ranges in every job posting so that candidates don’t bother applying for jobs that don’t pay enough for them to live on. This shouldn’t be an issue if your salaries are competitive.
• Check your job posting is accessible to screen-readers: Not all job boards, websites or forms are accessible to screen readers, so it’s worth running your job posting through a tool to check. 

Use Different Job Boards and Sources

Use job boards where you’re likely to find diverse candidates, especially niche job boards aimed at different identities. Look at your data from different job boards and stop using job boards that consistently fail to give you diverse candidates. 

Think about employee referral too—while this can be a great way of sourcing candidates, employees tend to refer candidates similar to themselves.

Have a Diverse Interview Panel

Diverse interview panels are more likely to hire diverse candidates, so it’s good practice to make your interview panel as diverse as possible. If you don’t have enough diversity in your management, consider creating a panel of employees to consult on hiring issues or bring in outside consultants. 

Use Apps To Help You Hire Fairly

It’s common for bias to creep in when recruiters look at candidates’ CVs so that candidates with less white-sounding names, experience or qualifications from non-white spaces are at a disadvantage. To avoid this, you can use apps like Unbiasify which cover up applicants’ names and places where they’ve worked or studied.

Don’t Sort Candidates With AIs

While software can be helpful in the hiring process, using AIs to sort your resumes can make issues with bias worse. If you tell your AI to consider people who have attended certain universities or worked at certain companies, you will overlook many diverse candidates. 

Prep Candidates

Prep candidates properly for the interview process, telling them what to expect and how long their interview is going to be. This is great for time-poor candidates as well as candidates with anxiety or neurodiverse candidates. 

Standardize Your Interview Process: 

For the sake of fairness, standardize your interview process so that everyone has the chance to interview well: 

• Decide what you are looking for in advance (this should have been done at the job description stage)
• Ask every candidate the same questions
• Give every candidate the same amount of time to prepare for the interview and the same amount of time in the interview
• Don’t rush the interview process, because that makes it hard to make good decisions

Avoid “Groupthink” Among Recruiters

Make sure that interviewers don’t talk to each other while making hiring decisions—this only leads to a “groupthink” scenario, which can disadvantage diverse candidates if any other recruiters have issues with unconscious bias. 

Avoid Unconscious Bias

Similarity bias—liking and hiring people who are like you—is real in recruitment. Another common form of unconscious bias is confirmation bias, where the recruiter looks for and latches onto traits that they expect in candidates from certain groups. 

Avoid these biases by making your recruiters undergo training, either in the form of anti-bias workshops or by taking Harvards’ Implicit Bias Test.  

Let Go of Culture Fit

Culture fit is something that needs to be retired if we want diverse and inclusive workplaces. “Culture fit” tends to mean looking for someone who has the same values and behaves similarly to your existing employees. This is terrible for candidates of color and neurodiverse candidates. Here’s why: 

• Recruiters might not think people of color fit into the organisation because of similarity bias or cultural communication barriers
• Neurodiverse people may struggle to act a certain way because of difficulty with social skills and non-verbal communication

Don’t Give (Difficult) Tests

Ask yourself if you really need to test your candidates. Tests, especially complicated ones, discriminate against time-poor candidates and neurodiverse candidates who don’t test well. 

Get Candidate Feedback

Surveying candidates about their candidate experience (especially those who drop out) is a great way to expose flaws in your hiring process. You might even find out that one of your recruiters is the problem. However, be aware that diverse candidates may not have as much time to fill in surveys. 

Implementing equitable and inclusive hiring practices is something your company can easily do  with the help of these tips. You won’t regret it—remember, a more diverse workforce benefits you too. Strategies such as blind scanning of resumes and writing inclusive job descriptions can help you create inclusive hiring practices that will help you achieve your DEI goals. Pypa Hire can also help you achieve your DEI goals by streamlining your hiring process—Register for Pypa Hire today!