29th January 2024 - Jobs, Career

The Role Of The Recruitment Partner In Driving Diversity And Inclusion For Your Business

There are numerous undisputed benefits to a more diverse and inclusive workforce, such as greater innovation, higher employee retention, and powerful employee attraction. It has become a key business objective for most organisations. Talented people want to work for employers with good employment practices and they also want to feel valued at work. According to Deloitte, employees’ ability to innovate increased by an impressive 83 percent when they felt their organization was committed to diversity. A study by Boston Consulting Group found that companies with diverse management teams generated an average of 19 percent more revenue than those without.

But to achieve a diverse workforce and experience these benefits you must look at your recruitment practices. The benefit of having workforce diversity and inclusion in your recruitment practices is that you get the best person for the job, and acquire the best skills and abilities regardless of the persons age, gender, sexual orientation, ethnic background etc.

In house recruitment can face challenges in changing their recruitment practices to support this endeavour. In doing things the way we have always done, and to look for talent in the places we have always looked, we are not going to widen the talent pool of our organisation. In a nutshell it can be hard to get out of your candidate comfort zone.

Are unconscious biases interfering with recruitment decision making? Unfortunately unconscious bias exists and is a very common issue. This is where unintentional assumptions are made about a group of people or where we recruit someone similar to ourselves as there is a sense of comfort in the expectation that they will perform as we have done. This approach can lead to missing out on top talent. The lack of diversity, unintentionally or not, has the knock on effects of poor innovation, a lack of creativity and reduced problem solving.

This is where your recruitment partner can add value and guide you to achieving your diversity and inclusion goals, by driving you to attract and retain the people you need to guarantee better business outcomes.

Recruiters are responsible for identifying and bringing a wider range of candidates into the talent pool. They can do this by having a vast and diverse network of contacts to tap into. A recruitment partner knows your business but are not embedded enough into your culture to have a “type” in mind and therefore they will put more diverse candidates in front of you. Your recruitment partner can send you blind resumes which will encourage you to focus on the skills and expertise candidates hold rather than their background, gender, age etc.

You recruitment partner should be an expert at designing job adverts that appeal to more diverse candidates and will post these adverts on job boards or on their professional networks where the candidates are more varied. They source candidates in places you perhaps traditionally do not. Your professional or social network may consist of people of a similar age to you, with a similar background, working in a specific industry or with similar interests to your own for example.

In addition, your recruitment partner can go one step further and assist you in designing interview questions that support your objective, join you on the interview panel for added impartiality or go so far as to conduct personality assessments to ensure a balanced approach.

Reflecting on this it is clear that business that implement strong diversity and inclusion practices will have a strong competitive advantage including but not limited to heightened employer brand, better decisions and better ideas. Global business leaders such as Mercer and Exelon have testified before American Congress that diversity and inclusion practices in their organisations have been the driving force in their success and have suggested that we need to stop thinking about it as a moral imperative but a business imperative.

Speak to your recruitment partner today to discover how they can support you in enhancing your own competitive advantage through diversity and inclusion.