What Innovative Approaches Help Diversify the Candidate Pool?
CHRO Daily
What Innovative Approaches Help Diversify the Candidate Pool?
In the quest to enhance diversity within their teams, we've gathered insights from Talent Acquisition Specialists and company founders. Starting with targeting employed top-tier talent to collaborating with local tech schools, discover the five innovative strategies these professionals are employing to diversify their candidate pools.
- Target Employed Top-Tier Talent
- Introduce AI-Based First-Round Screening
- Partner with Non-Traditional Talent Pipelines
- Audit Language for Unintended Biases
- Collaborate with Local Tech Schools
Target Employed Top-Tier Talent
As a remote staffing agency, our headhunters take an innovative approach to diversifying our candidate pool by targeting top-tier talent who are already employed, including those in underrepresented regions. We focus on identifying and engaging with the best professionals who may not be actively seeking new opportunities but are open to exploring roles that offer greater flexibility, growth, and impact. By strategically approaching these high-caliber candidates, we ensure our clients have access to a diverse pool of proven talent, bringing in individuals who are not only skilled but also bring fresh perspectives and experiences to the table.
Introduce AI-Based First-Round Screening
As a CEO, I prioritized diversity in recruitment by introducing an 'interview-free' first stage. Traditional interviews often harbor unconscious biases, so we turned to AI instead. We developed a neutral AI platform to assess first-round applications purely based on skills and potential, completely detached from identifiers like name, age, or ethnicity. This revolutionary method has expanded our candidate pool, offering chances to talents previously overlooked due to bias.
Partner with Non-Traditional Talent Pipelines
One innovative approach I've taken to diversify our candidate pool is partnering with non-traditional talent pipelines such as coding boot camps, community colleges, and organizations dedicated to underrepresented groups in tech and other industries. This is how it works:
1. Strategic Partnerships: I established relationships with these institutions and organizations to identify and recruit candidates who might not follow the typical university-to-corporate path but possess valuable skills and perspectives.
2. Customized Outreach: We created tailored outreach programs, including workshops and networking events, to connect with these candidates early and provide them with insights into our company culture and opportunities.
3. Inclusive Job Descriptions: We reviewed and revised our job descriptions to ensure they were inclusive and appealing to a broader audience, focusing on essential skills rather than strict degree or experience requirements.
This approach significantly increased the diversity of our candidate pool, bringing in talented individuals with diverse backgrounds and unique perspectives who might have been overlooked in traditional recruiting channels. These hires have contributed fresh ideas and innovation, enriching our workplace culture and driving business success.
Audit Language for Unintended Biases
Diversifying your candidate pool requires a careful auditing of your preferred vernacular. We all have a tendency to repeatedly choose one word or phrase over another, and it's not until we've collected all our writings that it becomes apparent. And these linguistic preferences aren't benign; they often contain inadvertent biases. Gendered or culturally specific language is so prevalent you likely don't notice you're using it.
The solution, for me as a technology recruiter, is periodically bringing in a sensitivity reader to be sure I'm not confirming existing segregation or marginalization in roles. Terms convey unintended meaning, and since language is changing all the time, a third-party with expertise in the subject can really help ensure wording is as objective as possible.
You can be disseminating your job posting in all the right places, but if your language is catering to white heterosexual cis men, you'll never see diversity in applicants.
Collaborate with Local Tech Schools
As an AI and technology company focused on streamlining operations, we have taken an innovative approach to diversifying our team by partnering with local tech schools and coding boot camps. Through these partnerships, we have been able to find strong, diverse candidates that we may have missed through traditional channels.
For example, we recently hired two women from a local tech training program. One has since been promoted to lead one of our key engineering teams. These types of partnerships take time to build but have been essential for us to access new sources of talent and continue innovating.
Meeting with these groups, understanding their mission, and seeing how we can collaborate, whether through internships, mentorships, or funding training programs, has been key. It provides mutual value and helps broaden our candidate pool in an authentic way. With the talent shortage, forging new relationships and thinking outside the box is critical.
