How inclusive is your recruitment operation?💫

At Above and Beyond, inclusivity is at the forefront of everything that we do. Whether that’s supporting candidates through their interview stages, onboarding our own members of staff or discussing processes with clients, it’s extremely important and not something to overlook.

We’ve put together some top tips to ensure your recruitment operation is truly inclusive.

Starting at the beginning: When you’re looking for potential people to join your team, widen your candidate search. Where are you finding them? Where are they finding you? If the answers to these questions aren’t varied, it’s likely the types of people you’re attracting won’t be either. Think about different avenues to widen your pool of candidates. Join, sponsor or advertise in different networking groups and communities to broaden your brand awareness.

Once you’ve invited your candidates to interview, you should think about what this looks like. Think about:

💫 Asking pronouns at the start of the process and addressing them correctly throughout

💫 Sharing information about company policies and culture ahead of someone attending an interview. This will make people feel less anxious about how well they will be supported in your organisation

💫 Having a diverse recruitment panel. Representation within the work place can be really important for new candidates. Knowing they will work with a diverse team and that there are other people in the business they can identify with will be crucial to how comfortable they feel

💫 Create a truly inclusive hiring process, which allows multiple pathways to getting a job with you and empowers the candidate to choose the journey that best suits them. The goal is to create a process that really gets the best out of each individual, whilst also allowing you to make sure they have the right skills for the role. For example, do they prefer a phone or video interview? Would they prefer a live coding task in the interview, or a take home rest? Are questions prepared and revealed ahead of time? These are all worthwhile things to consider to ensure you’re giving every person the chance to perform their best and demonstrate that you have a supportive and inclusive culture

When you’re making your decision, be aware of your own unconscious bias. We can’t necessarily stop this bias kicking in, but we can learn to recognise it and overcome it. Some key tips include anonymising and randomising interview tasks and answers for scoring, so you’re scoring each answer on its merit alone. There are some great programmes to help you with this, or you can replicate such things on a spreadsheet as a cheaper option💷

Once you’ve extended an offer to someone (and they’ve accepted), there are lots of things you can do to make your new team member feel included. For example, ensure their correct pronouns are on all of their new starter information and that they are addressed correctly by the wider team. Perhaps allocate them with another employee as a buddy or mentor who can answer any questions they might have before starting. But most importantly, take feedback on their experience of the hiring and onboarding process and act upon it. Building an inclusive culture means creating an environment that works for everyone and this is a constant work in progress. Your members of staff need to feel heard when they are courageous enough to speak up📢

Lastly! You can’t track what you don’t measure📈 Firstly look at the demographic breakdown of your organisation and where you don’t feel you have equitable representation. Then look at the diversity within your pipeline, but also track the conversion rates through your hiring process and to offer. It is one thing to build a more diverse pool of applicants, but if the bias in your interview process is knocking a lot of these people out unfairly, then you aren’t actually improving your overall diversity mix in your team. Also, look at offer acceptance rates. Are you giving people the confidence that your company will be an inclusive place for them to work? Then consider the retention rates of different demographics within your company. Is the attrition rate higher among certain demographics due to company culture or policies?

Traditionally, recruitment has previously been a bit of a one-size-fits-all process. Having one set hiring process, one set onboarding experience and one way of appraising everyone, felt like the easiest and, sometimes, the fairest way of doing things.

But, good recruitment and good people ops is about getting the best out of each person at each stage of the process. The way in which you do that needs to be different for each person.

So why not think about switching it up next time you hire?

💫 Write your job advert differently

💫 Post it in different forums

💫 Review CVs differently

💫 Prepare people differently

💫 Allow people different options throughout the process

Is there anything you would add to create a fully inclusive recruitment experience? Reach out to us and let us know!