In 2021, more than 47 million people, or nearly 30% of the American labor force resigned from their jobs. If you are a company that is suffering from astonishingly high attrition rates, it’s time to look at the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in your team. More than just a buzzword, DEI is a commitment to forging a work culture that is inclusive, fair, and respectful.
According to TurboHire’s Recruitment Industry Report, companies focus on DEI because it positively impacts business culture, overall performance, and customer representation.
At the same time, job seekers are becoming more concerned about their potential employer's commitment to diversity. According to MIT Sloan’s research, a toxic work culture is 10.4 times more crucial than compensation when predicting the employee turnover rate for an organization. With one of the leading reasons for a toxic work culture being a lack of diversity in the workforce, it comes as no surprise that Glassdoor found that 76% of employees and job seekers stated a diverse staff was crucial.
A candidate's first impression of a company is generally formed during the job selection process. As an employer, you can boost your chances of selecting the best candidate for the job by engaging in an inclusive hiring process. Furthermore, it demonstrates your devotion to DEI and sets you apart from your competitors.
Unconscious racism, ageism, sexism, and several other biases can affect hiring decisions. Learning how to mitigate discriminatory processes through inclusive hiring practices can help your company create a positive reputation and work culture. This article will explain the importance of DEI and give you examples of how to include it within your firm.
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What is DEI?
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) has emerged as a critical and transformative factor in the workplace and society. The goal of DEI is for firms to consider various candidates for job openings within and outside the organization. This inclusive hiring process creates a workplace with equitable opportunity and diverse leadership that helps associates feel welcome.
In recruiting, unconscious bias and affinity bias frequently manifest as a preference for one applicant over another based on cultural fit. Unconscious biases can have many consequences, such as homogenous or discriminatory hiring or specific candidates being favored for promotions. Over time, these hiring practices can promote inequality in the company.
On the other hand, an inclusive recruiting process judges each candidate on their merit and benefits from their unique values and viewpoints. Inclusive hiring goes beyond numbers; simply hiring a fixed number of people from marginalized ethnic groups isn’t enough. To be equitable and diverse in recruitment, a firm must commit to creating a level playing field for applications and set up a framework to assist hiring managers in avoiding biases.
DEI is an ethos that celebrates varied perspectives and experiences. Employees' personal and professional well-being is vital for companies to create a positive work culture. Organizations must be active in their approach to DEI and develop training guidelines and systems to make the workplace a place of diversity, equality, and inclusivity. Let's look at how to include DEI values in your hiring operations.
DEI in hiring practices
Here are a few things companies can do to be more diverse, equitable, and inclusive through their hiring process:
Creating diverse interview panels
Having a diverse interview panel can also help increase representation in the candidate pool and reduce homogeneity in the firm. Interviewers belonging to different races, age groups, genders, and fields can bring unique perspectives to the table and reduce unconscious bias.
An inclusive selection team helps candidates feel more comfortable and increases diversity in hiring practices.
At FloCareer, we have an army of 3,000+ technical interviewers (FloExperts) who have successfully completed over 300,000+ interviews. Our interviewers come from varying backgrounds, and this allows us to offer your potential job candidates an unbiased interview that is driven by a structured interview guide.
On-demand interviews
Technology-assisted video interviews with pre-determined questions are an intelligent method to reduce prejudice in your employment process. In addition to being organized, on-demand interviews offer candidates flexible interviewing choices. This flexibility allows particular groups, such as parents and students, the opportunity to complete interviews around their existing schedules.
Hiring processes that offer interviews without rigid logistical and geographical requirements can expand the talent pool by reducing entry barriers. With FloCareer’s On Demand Interviews, you can automate the process, letting candidates appear for interviews anytime, anywhere, and through any device.
Standardizing interviews
Unstructured interviews lack a predetermined set of questions and are intended to reveal a candidate's experience and knowledge via conversation. These interviews may be unreliable in forecasting job success and be heavy with unconscious biases, thus creating an unfair selection process.
Structured and focused interviews, on the other hand, ensure that each interviewee is presented with a predecided set of questions that are consistent across applicants. This type of interview helps reduce bias and standardize the process by giving interviewers clarity and direction.
FloCareer uses crowd-sourced question banks to create an interview structure tailored to your company's requirements and the job description, helping create a transparent and consistent interview process.
The value of unbiased interviews
Making decisions based on unconscious prejudice can be harmful to individuals and the company since it leads to a lack of diversity in the workplace and promotes discrimination. Individuals from many backgrounds, including but not limited to race, socio-economic levels, gender, age, and sexual orientation, bring different values to a company and help create a global and contemporary organization.
Inclusive hiring is an effective method for creating a better and more diverse organization, and it has moral and practical benefits. Lawsuits relating to discrimination in the workplace can cost firms time and money and harm their reputation. Such legal action is not rare: in 2020, employers in the US paid $439.2 million in settlements and lawsuits in response to 67,448 charges of workplace discrimination.
Another practical benefit of cultivating inclusive hiring practices, such as unbiased interviews, is protecting the company's reputation. A company that is known to be fair and diverse can create a solid corporate reputation in a competitive market, attracting quality talent. In addition, the sense of inclusion that comes from having a diverse workforce can positively impact productivity, innovation, and performance.
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A firm that focuses on equality and works to reduce discrimination can bolster the organization's image as one that values diversity and inclusion. Moreover, an inclusive and diverse workforce can help a company better reflect its customer demographic.
The first step toward creating an inclusive workplace is establishing a foundation for hiring diverse applicants. FloCareer offers many cutting-edge features to reduce bias in hiring, provides candidates with flexibility in the application process, and helps your firm meet its DEI goals.
