Whether your hiring process impacts your diversity recruiting results is a question every recruiting leader is, or should be, asking themselves these days. Is your talent pool diversity reduced because of how diverse candidates experience your recruiting process?
From job ads to sourcing to employer brand to application processes to interviews to candidate communications – it all affects different humans differently.
Or maybe it doesn’t.
But this is not something you want to guess about. If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that assuming any organization knows how diverse candidates react to their hiring process is probably not a good strategy for diversity recruiting. Organizations need to KNOW. They need to be sure. Studies show that diverse workforces have higher revenues and are more likely to to be innovators. And 67% job seekers say diversity is an important factor in evaluating companies.
So if you really want to make your diversity recruiting more effective, the last thing you would want is for your hiring process NOT to properly serve diverse populations.
Ensure Your Hiring Process Supports Diversity Recruiting
The most important aspect of ensuring your process works for a broad spectrum of candidates is data. Data defines the problem (and the opportunity), and properly defining a problem is two thirds of solving it. At least, that’s what Dr. Phil says.
And the kind of data needed to understand your diversity recruiting efforts comes from your candidates. A solid, ongoing recruiting feedback program is the bedrock for hiring in the 2020s, and those organizations who have it, can gain a leg up on their competition by using that candidate feedback to tailor their processes to the diversity they wish to attract and engage.
And the best part is that organizations don’t have to ask any special questions or do any complex analysis to get a clear picture of how their non-diversity centric processes affect diversity recruiting. Simply ask every candidate some simple questions at each stage of the hiring process. Here are some basic questions that every organization should be asking candidates as they move through the hiring process.
Then view those results by diversity segment to easily spot deltas between the broad data set (everyone who answered the question) and the specific data set (*women who answer the question, for example).
So how do you gather the responses to these questions so you can analyze them by diversity class? Not with surveys.
Continuous Recruiting Feedback
One off surveys can give you a picture of how candidates feel about various stages of your recruiting process, but they usually don’t make it easy to map that data back to key operational data in your ATS like EEO self reporting data, stage and status data, job data, etc.
And the biggest problem is that you are gathering this data from candidates who interacted with you a while back. They no longer have any incentive to give you feedback because they have already been dispositioned. And, they probably can’t remember specifics.
With a continuous recruiting feedback platform, integrated with your ATS, candidates get automatic pulse survey requests after each interaction with your jobs, applications, recruiters, hiring managers, offers, and more. They are engaged in the process so the feedback is fresh in their minds and they want to engage with you in any way they can because they want to get hired.
This approach unlocks the power of your operational data in your ATS, and as I wrote above, one major piece of operational data is EEO self identification. One of the MAJOR benefits of continuous recruiting feedback is that you not only identify where problems or opportunities exist, but you also get candidate comments to tell you exactly what’s going on if there is a problem.
So if a particular diversity segment is less satisfied with your job descriptions than the entire universe of candidates, you can find out exactly why. You can find out exactly which job descriptions are responsible for this behavior, and so on.
And, by the way, this continuous feedback provides huge value even outside of your diversity recruiting efforts. It can be used to optimize your entire recruiting and onboarding process.
Two things you don’t want to do these days: 1)continue trying to optimize your recruiting department without continuous feedback from candidates, and 2) assuming that every candidate experiences your organization’s hiring process the same way.
