How to build a diverse workforce

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Are you working to engage with, and recruit for a more diverse workforce?

“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got” – Henry Ford

‘Diversity‘ is a word that many of us hear frequently. Whether your industry employs a diverse workforce or not, diversity and inclusivity in your business is something we should strive for.

We live in an era where a diverse and inclusive workforce has become the distinguishing feature of a successful organisation, and people can often be the single sustainable source of competitive advantage.

Managing diversity, like inclusivity requires an organisation to ensure that all decisions about the employment and training of people are objective, based on merit, relate to individual personal development criteria and support business goals.

At Cohesion, we can help achieve that diversity in the workplace.

Tracking the diversity of your applicants is step one. Using our ATS – Career Portal, we will monitor, track and report on the diversity of all applicants. We know that our clients want their recruitment processes to be fair and accessible to all applicants, so we use the data to inform where appropriate interventions may be required. For example, when tracking applications, if we can see that our client would like increased applications from one particular demographic specifically, we can introduce a targeted campaign to address this.

We also analyse data throughout the process, specifically looking at protected characteristics and socio-economic background, to see how they are progressing through the recruitment process.

If there is evidence to show that those with protected characteristics are falling out of the process at a particular stage, we will ensure interventions are made to support those groups.

For example, in terms of gender diversity, we have noticed for one of our clients, that females tend to do less well at ability testing than males, and males tend to do less well at video interview than females, as such, we have created relevant supporting documents, practice platforms and videos for each group, which are deployed ahead of that part of the process.

Ensuring that attraction strategies include a broad range of diverse applicants is essential for you and your strategic priorities. We will recommend specific additional attraction routes to enhance diversity, as well as discussing elements of the recruitment process to ensure that a diverse range of applicants are able to be considered:

What else can we do to increase diversity?

There is a huge pool of talent in schools and colleges. These need to be considered in order to create a more diverse workplace. Talking to students early on and engaging with them will create an interest in careers they may not have thought of.

Engaging with new audiences means a wider talent pool and step towards creating a more diverse workforce as well as combatting the skills shortage that many industries face.

Attracting and engaging applicants at every stage of the recruitment process has never been more important – companies who achieve this and do it well, will emerge with an advantage to propel their business to the next level.