Diversity, Equity & Inclusion: 7 ways to tailor your job ad to attract a more diverse talent pool
A recent survey by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) found that 57% of recruiters say their talent acquisition strategies are designed to attract diverse candidates. Like many organizations, you may be prioritizing diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) in 2021. A commitment to DE&I is not only the right thing to do, it’s also smart leadership and good business. The evidence is clear: organizations that effectively recruit and manage a diverse workforce have a clear competitive advantage. Organizations with strong DE&I strategies retain engaged, innovative and dedicated talent. These environments drive productivity and cultivate employee satisfaction, leading to increased financial performance. If you’re responsible for recruitment in your organization, you should make hiring for diversity a priority. As a recruiter, you’re the gatekeeper with massive control over how diverse your organization is. Failure to attract and recruit diverse talent, due to conscious or unconscious bias, or a lack of strategy, will likely result in decreased levels of creativity and innovation and can impact other areas of the business. As we shared in The Talent Scout podcast episode about why diversity matters in the world of recruitment: diverse companies on average enjoy 2.3 times higher cash flow per employee and diverse teams are 87% better at making decisions. Here are seven ways to tailor your recruitment advertisement to bring more diverse talent into your organization. 1. Ensure your jobs are consistent with your overall Employer Brand Before diving into specific job ad tips, it’s important to note DE&I is not a one-off initiative. It should be a holistic, long-term priority that aligns with your overall Employer Brand. For example, if someone reads your job ad, then visits your careers website, the brand messaging and imagery you share and promote should be in alignment. (Do you actually care about diversity, or are you just saying you do? Do you have a diversity statement? Do you support employees with disabilities?) Your employer brand should promote support and equal opportunity for your job ads to be truly effective at attracting diverse talent. 2. Define your recruitment marketing strategy Improving diversity is more than choosing, for example, a female, from your candidate pool. It must be front of mind and a goal before you begin the recruitment process. Speak to experts in attracting different groups of candidates. Who are you targeting? How can you speak to them authentically? The types of candidates you are looking for will determine your strategy. For example, your strategy to increase gender diversity will require a different strategy to attracting more Indigenous Australians. Here’s how Alex Fraser and Hanson recruited female drivers by strengthening their employer brand and using targeted recruitment advertisements. After their first successful campaign, reaching 137% of their female hiring target, they used imagery and employee profile interviews with women to recruit for their next program. 3. Go to market If you’ve ever outsourced recruitment to typical external agencies, they’ll often draw on their existing database. Doing this severely limits your ability to attract a diverse applicant pool. Your recruiter should use different recruitment processes and sourcing channels, including niche job boards, and both active and passive advertising channels. One of Scout Talent’s key differentiators as a recruitment partner is that our Recruitment Marketing Specialists go to market to source talent from a wide range of channels. This gives you a far greater chance of improving diversity in your organization and finding those who are a cultural add (not just a “cultural fit”). 4. Use the right language Language choices in your recruitment advertisement absolutely impact the applicant pool you’ll be capable of attracting. In particular, remove coded language that can lead to gender bias. Take Buffer, for example, striving to understand why they were struggling to attract female developers. They discovered the word “hackers” was limiting female applications. Removing this word and other gender-coded words enabled them to increase gender diversity in their applicant pool. (For example, “rockstar”, “leader”, “ninja”, and “dominate”.) Consider using online tools to assess the language in your recruitment advertisements. You can also benefit from avoiding unnecessary jargon. While experienced candidates may understand your corporate lingo and terminology, studies show jargon and corporate language in job postings is one of the biggest barriers keeping talented young people from applying to entry-level positions. Use clear, concise language. 5. Limit your selection criteria Research reveals women are less likely to apply for roles unless they meet 100% of selection criteria (even if some criteria states “desirable” – females are still less likely to apply.) Interestingly, this may not be necessarily due to a lack of confidence, but rather a mindset that recruiters wouldn’t hire them for not meeting their selection criteria and not wanting to waste their time and energy. Recruit more diverse talent by tightening up your selection criteria list and including only the non-negotiables. You never know the great candidates you’ll be able to attract who may be your ideal match. 6. Reference your organization’s commitment to DE&I Some organizations prefer to include a line in their recruitment advertisements about their commitment to DE&I; others prefer to weave this messaging throughout the copy. Hubspot, for example, include the following paragraph in their jobs ads to attract a diverse field of applications: “Confidence can sometimes hold us back from applying for a job. But we’ll let you in on a secret: there’s no such thing as a ‘perfect’ candidate. HubSpot is a place where everyone can grow. So however you identify and whatever background you bring with you, please apply if this is a role that would make you excited to come into work every day.” A simple, but effective, personalized statement such as this can drastically improve the diversity of your talent pool. 7. Share inclusive benefits What benefits do you offer that could make your role more attractive to a diverse talent pool? Benefits such as flexibility, parental leave, childcare subsidies, health insurance and more can make your ad more attractive to groups such as working parents and those with accessibility issues. Draw attention
How Ethical Leadership Can Improve Your Employer Brand
Every organization wants the right person in the right job. Every person contemplating the roughly 90,000 hours they’ll be spending at work wants to be in the right job. This is why magazines such as Forbes release annual lists of the world’s best employers, and why sites like Glassdoor, where employees rate their employers, exist. If you’re going to spend a third of your lifetime at work, you’re going to research what different organizations offer. So how can employers ensure their Employer Brand is viewed favourably and can compete against its contemporaries? Know what motivates the people you want to hire. Understanding what motivates your people Yes, salaries and perks matter but they’re fairly generic. There’s probably not much you offer that your competitors can’t match. Where you can differentiate yourself is through your principles. It’s increasingly important for potential employees to find companies with values that align with their own, particularly (but not only) to millennials who will comprise 75% of the workforce in 2025. One of the effects of the pandemic is that it has thrown into sharp relief what matters to people, in their personal and professional lives. Whether it’s flexible working hours, changing where they live or ditching their commute, people now know what’s possible. In the years to come, they’ll be looking for companies that accommodate those choices, and allow them to bring their whole selves to work. They’ve also watched how organizations have treated their staff in this crisis and taken note. “It’s increasingly important for potential employees to find companies with values that align with their own, particularly (but not only) to millennials who will comprise 75% of the workforce in 2025.” Organizational values can no longer be the laminated sheet on the wall of the office kitchen. They need to be the authentic foundations of company processes and systems, informing decision-making and making the company’s actions consistent and transparent. Those values need to genuinely permeate the daily experience of employees. It starts from the top This starts at the top. Staff are significant stakeholders and need to be recognized as such. People want to make a positive impact. They want to genuinely speak with pride about what their company stands for. They want to work for leaders with integrity, and they expect a high degree of transparency about decisions that affect them. Employees flourish when working with ethical leaders; those who create a culture in which employees can safely challenge decisions, and where contributions are welcomed. The right organizational culture produces a secure and productive workforce – proud ambassadors who’ll champion your brand on their social channels and in their professional interactions. Once you’ve got the right people on board, how do you keep them there? Organizational churn is disruptive, and costly. It’s estimated that the Canadian economy loses $3.8bn each year in lost productivity due to staff turnover. Work perks aren’t enough to keep staff hanging on in the face of toxic organizational culture and unethical leadership. The resulting low morale tends to breed a culture of mere compliance and minimum effort amongst those who stay, and high turnover as those who can leave do. Creating ethical decision-making frameworks Invest in your human resources the way you do any other. Everyone in their career will face challenges that can’t be solved by a Code of Conduct. Help your people meet these challenges by providing professional development which exposes them to different ethical decision-making frameworks and increases their ability to work through ambiguity. Empower them to move from simply following rules to being able to question the rightness of an action or circumstance. Ethical fade is real and needs to be consciously addressed. Strengthen their judgement and critical thinking skills. Support people who are motivated to create change along ethical lines and make sure their efforts are recognized. Equip your employees with the capabilities to assess the impact of the organization’s priorities and overtly give permission for them to act constructively on what they may uncover. All of these measures will help them, and the organization, make the right decisions for the right reasons at the right time. There are many positive benefits of strong ethical leadership – brand safety, reputation management and growing market share. But among the most important is attracting and retaining high calibre staff who will share their experience of your organization widely. Word of mouth is a powerful force, and it’s a recruitment tool you want to get right. If you would like to learn more about how to improve your Employer Brand, get in touch with us here.
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The Talent Scout Episode 29: Scout Talent’s 5 steps to successful Employer Branding
This post is written by our Senior Recruitment Marketing Specialist, Shane Keane. We’ve touched on it before but it’s always useful to not get lost in the conversation and to remind ourselves what we mean when we talk about employer branding. Employer branding is the way you go about cutting through the noise of your competition and connecting powerfully and meaningfully with the very best candidates. At its essence employer branding is all about positioning your organisation as a great place to work for the right people, for the right reasons. There’s a difference between recruitment marketing and regular marketing. Recently in a webinar of ours, I compared and contrasted recruitment marketing, which is a subset of employer branding, and regular marketing. The reason I did this was to acknowledge that yes, they are similar concepts using similar tools but at their foundations, they have different goals. Traditional marketing has the goal of continuously increasing the number of consumers for an organisation, that’s a success for marketing. If recruitment marketing and employer branding continuously increase the number of candidates, that’s a massive failure. Firstly, more candidates does not mean more good candidates, and secondly, more candidates just make it a harder and more time-consuming process to get to your new hire. This means that while consumer marketing and recruitment marketing may use similar tools to achieve their aims, the way they use these tools have to be fundamentally different because their respective goals are hugely different. Your Employer Brand is how your current and future people think and feel about you as an organisation. As you can imagine this is made up of every interaction that these individuals have had with you and your brand and while you can’t control it, you can certainly shape and influence it. But the way you go about shaping and influencing the sentiment that makes up your employer brand shouldn’t be to position yourself as an organisation that appeals to all people; it should be to position yourself so that you are the most appealing organisation to the sort of people who are most likely going to drive your organisation forward. You might consider the phrase “driving your organisation forward” to be a bit hyperbolic but there is truth to it. This is because your employer brand really does determine the quality of your workforce. A strong employer brand is directly linked to and encourages the levels of engagement, motivation, and retention found within your workforce. Each of these factors is also strongly linked to higher revenues, profit margins, and overall return on investment in people operations. Furthermore, recruiters who build a strong employer brand are twice as likely to receive responses from the candidates they contact while companies with a strong employer brand can reduce their cost-per-hire by 50%. Of course, knowing how a strong employer brand can benefit you isn’t enough because the big question is, how do you make employer branding work for you. At Scout Talent when we work with our clients to develop, refine, and activate their employer branding. We do this by using the following 5 Steps to successful employer branding: Understand your audience and your brand Articulate your unique authentic brand Amplify your message to the right people Live your EVP and practice what you pitch Measure your results and grow your impact 1. Understand your audience and your brand To understand your audience and your brand it is critical that you begin by identifying what your target audience values most in their job, career, and even their life. Ask yourself how do each of these facets interact with your talent offering. The best way to do this is to carry out a thorough and robust research process to determine how your employees see you. Try to be as objective as possible or better still, work with an external group who can offer an unbiased viewpoint. Once you’ve carried out this research project use the insights you’ve gained to develop your employer branding themes and the key elements that you can authentically sell your organisation on in order to attract talent. 2. Articulate your unique authentic brand Having unpacked your employer brand, the next step in the process is all about crafting your core proposition and articulating your unique and authentic proposition. At this point, it’s common to establish and realise your employer value proposition statement. However, you should also try to establish your key messaging which quickly and powerfully communicates your “why work for us.” This is a unique and single-line message that you can weave into your talent efforts. If we look at Nike as an example their traditional marketing tagline is “Just do it” while when you enter their careers site the three words that instead greet you in large bold writing are “Move the world”. That’s who they are, that’s what they want for the people who join their organisation and that’s what you’ve got to strive towards when developing and unpacking your employer brand – something that is authentically you and appeals to the individuals who are going to be best suited to grow your organisation. 3. Amplify your message to the right people Armed with research and a robust employer value proposition it’s now time to amplify your message to the right people. 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