9.4 Recruiting Diverse Talent

Recruiting: Where do I begin?

So far, this content has discussed what diversity, inclusion, equity, and belonging are and why they are essential to successful teams. There has also been discussion about cultural competence, learning more about different cultures and recognizing our own biases. The pieces have started falling into place regarding leading, building, and evaluating existing structures in an organization. Let’s presume that your organization has started to evolve, with better professional development, the leadership is more diversity-focused, and now you are ready to recruit new people to your organization. You are looking for diverse people with unique perspectives that can help your organization be innovators, to be creative geniuses, to lead the way in your sector.

But how do you recruit talent? Or really, how do you recruit this specific kind of talent that will support your mission to include, diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging? Great question.

There will always be challenges when hiring for a position, the cliché: Good help is hard to find, is a cliché for a reason. But, there are some steps that an organization can take to ensure a more successful search:

1. Communication is the keystone to success. Communicate internally and externally about your commitment to diversity, that it is critical. Make diverse qualities, like whether a person is bilingual, an essential component of the job description rather than at the end saying: Spanish-speaking preferred. Attract diverse staff by valuing the skills of the diverse staff.
2. Another step is to make your candidate pool as broad as possible from the beginning. Break into target networks by completing some research ahead of time. Search outside of the “usual” networks to find who you are looking for, including specific neighborhoods, associations, or even when perusing on networking sites like LinkedIn.
3. It may not be possible, depending on your budget, but asking firms to help with these searches may be a viable option as well. But choose carefully, it takes time for any organization or individual to develop deep networks and high-quality relationships that will make these searches a success. So, be sure to ask pointed questions about their experience and relationships. Do your homework!

Ultimately, if you want to find diverse people, you or your organization will need to commit 100% to this mission. It will be hard at times, to wriggle your way into new networks or to find that person to complete your team. But the pay off will most definitely be worth it in the end.

Methods of Recruitment

There are two main ways to recruit talent for your organization: internally or externally. Typically, to have the broadest pool of candidates, organizations are going to use both strategies. You may have to find what works best for you and your organization.

• Internal Recruitment: cost-effective but may not yield the diverse results you are looking for in a candidate.
  • Advertising openings internally
  • Using networking
• External Recruitment: expands the available talent pool, more diversity, but can be costly.
  • Traditional advertising in newspapers, the Internet, etc.
  • Job fairs, campus visits
  • Recruitment services
  • Online recruitment (using Indeed)

“Recruiting Diverse Talent” in Creating a Diverse and Inclusive Organizational Culture by Andrea Bearman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.