Diversity and Inclusion is a key priority for most organisations, and senior leaders have this firmly on the agenda.
Despite employers widely recognising the benefits of increasing diversity within their workforce, many have no programme to monitor activity across the recruitment process to understand where the opportunities lie in attracting candidates from a diverse range of backgrounds.
In this insight, we look at Diversity & Inclusion findings from the 5th UK Candidate Attraction Report and how tools and tech can support building a diverse and inclusive workforce. There are also plenty of free resources to help you!
D&I – it's a key recruitment challenge
The survey added Diversity and Inclusion to the list of challenges for the first time, and over a third of in-house recruiters stated 'Building a diverse and inclusive workforce' is one of their crucial recruitment challenges.
D&I is at the top of the hiring agenda for Government, Energy, Business Services, Legal and the Not-for-Profit sector. The results by organisation size were broadly similar across all company size demographics.
This prompted us to look at how Diversity and Inclusion are embedded into existing processes and measured and where the data feeds-in to ensure D&I initiatives are successful.
With the right tools, you can monitor applicants' diversity across age, ethnicity, gender, nationality, religion/belief and disability. At Eploy, many of our customers use our complete talent acquisition technology to monitor their D&I programme across each of the selection process stages – data is stored anonymously and not traceable to a single individual. Analysing this data allows organisations to determine where barriers exist to diverse talent entering the business and can take steps to address these issues.
Measuring diversity across the recruitment process
Whilst measuring D&I doesn't improve diversity and Inclusion itself, you can use the data to set priorities and drive future action of the company culture and strategy.
Rather than measuring workforce diversity solely at the onboarding stage, consider capturing it across the recruitment process. D&I based recruitment metrics can help raise your programme's profile and, through analysis, increase the range of candidates reached.
It's vital to take care not only in gathering data during your recruitment process but also in accessing the data. Ideally, diversity data should only be available to those users who need it, better still if it is also abstracted from personally identifiable information when reported. Interpreting D&I data also requires extreme care, consider the difference in population diversity in different locations - this could make comparing D&I performance from one region to another unfair.
Employers should also consider how job adverts and job descriptions are worded, taking care to check for unconscious bias, length and recruitment best practice. We have a free online tool that can help identify unconscious bias.
Help with what and how to measure
To help with measuring diversity, we have a developed a Recruitment Metrics Cookbook. It's a free downloadable resource that looks at a host of recruitment metrics and how this also applies to Diversity and Inclusion within your hiring process.
It includes the Diverse Candidate ratio - the numbers of candidates or applications for your vacancies based on Diversity & Inclusion information. For example, suppose you are looking to increase the number of women in your engineering team. In that case, it's worth understanding what proportion of engineering applications were made by women in the first instance.
The Submitted Diverse Candidate Ratio - can potentially be used to compare the effectiveness of individual recruiters.
Diverse Candidates Conversion ratios - the number of diverse candidates who move to the next stage and conversion rates against non-diverse candidates. Having calculated your conversion ratios between each stage-to-stage, you may find specific steps in your process where diverse candidates are more likely to convert - or not. By focusing on these areas in greater detail, you'll be in a better position to build on your successes and spot areas for improvement.
