The Best 10 Diversity Recruiting Strategies for HR

As a human resources manager, you are well acquainted with the complexities of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace. The reasons for diversity recruiting are obvious (higher employee engagement, unique perspectives, better customer insights – to name just a few benefits of diverse workforces and leadership teams), but implementation is often more challenging.

It would be easy to assume that the absence of overt discrimination is enough to create a culture of belonging, but this is a misconception. It requires conscious and continuous efforts; otherwise, you risk not only losing top candidates with valuable skills and perspectives but also negatively affecting the development of your existing team.

In this article, we present proactive strategies that allow you to reach a broader range of candidates, make your company more inclusive for everyone, leverage the benefits of a diverse workforce, and integrate diversity recruiting into your hiring processes from start to finish using an applicant management system.

What is diversity recruiting and why is it important?

Diversity recruiting is a strategic approach in the hiring process aimed at making your company's recruitment processes more open, unbiased, and fair for people of all backgrounds.

A common misconception about diversity recruiting is that it is about hiring someone based on their gender, ethnicity, or other characteristics. In fact, diversity recruiting still relies heavily on performance. When diversity recruiting is implemented successfully, entry barriers for certain groups are reduced, and diverse perspectives are recognized as valuable strengths.

Everyone deserves equal opportunities for success and development. However, unconscious biases and discrimination are still a reality for certain groups in the workplace and also hinder companies. Promoting diversity in the workplace is not only the right thing to do but also makes economic sense.

According to the McKinsey & Company report "Diversity Wins: How Inclusion Matters" from 2020, fostering diverse teams is a strategic necessity that helps companies achieve the following outcomes:

• Better customer representation and the ability to 'anticipate consumer needs and consumption patterns.
• Radical innovation, increased agility, and a greater readiness for 'recovery, resilience, and realignment.
• Stronger competitive advantage and the ability to 'make better and bolder decisions.

A recent survey by IceHrm also found that 45% of Generation Z job seekers consider workforce diversity a decisive factor in choosing whether or not to work for an employer – so the success of your entire recruitment effort depends on your commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

In other words: Diversity is good for your employees, your customers, and your profits. Let's take a look at some strategies to help you attract a more diverse workforce.

10 Strategies for Better Diversity Recruiting

1. Reducing Unconscious Bias

Unconscious biases can be diverse. The best way to overcome them is to recognize their manifestations and take appropriate precautions. Create optimal conditions for your recruiting team – and potential candidates – by integrating anti-bias techniques directly into your recruiting processes.

• Train your recruiting team on the topic of unconscious bias. Many of your employees may not be aware of these biases. That is exactly what is tricky about unconscious biases: we all have them without realizing it. The first step in combating unconscious bias is therefore to recognize when and how it can manifest. This can be achieved through training.
• Conduct anonymized resume reviews. Remove information that could reveal a candidate's gender, ethnic background, or age in order to minimize the risk of bias based on seemingly harmless details such as name, work experience, or education.
• Standardize the interview questions. By asking all applicants the same questions, you can focus more on performance indicators and less on likability, which is naturally subjective and can easily lead to a so-called likability bias.  
• Create work samples. An assessment based purely on skills is the fastest way to evaluate a candidate's work quality, rather than considering their appearance, background, or personality.

2. Ensure diversity in your selection and interview panels

As mentioned earlier, unconscious bias is widespread. Even with the best intentions, a homogeneous selection or interview team will find it difficult to effectively recruit diverse employees. If a candidate does not see anyone similar to themselves in the interview, they may feel excluded or uncomfortable and choose not to join your company.

3. Use recruiting software to automate the process

Your efforts to increase diversity in recruiting may start with the best intentions, but if your entire hiring process does not include user-friendly recruiting software, building and fostering a diverse workforce will be unnecessarily challenging.

IceHrm not only automates the recurring tasks in the hiring process that take up a lot of your time, but the applicant tracking system also helps you to:

• Reduce bias in the selection process
• Create job postings that are consistent and inclusive
• Optimize collaboration between teams

4. Revise Your Job Descriptions

You expand your talent pool by expressing your commitment to diversity in the language of your job postings. Does your language reflect the diversity of the talent you want to attract? By analyzing your postings more closely, you may be surprised at how you unconsciously signal to candidates that your company is not a fit for them.

Here are some points to keep in mind when creating and reviewing your job postings:

• Pay attention to gender-specific wording. Words like "aggressive," "dominate," and "challenge" are often perceived as masculine, even if that is not intended. With the Gender Decoder, you can check whether your job posting unintentionally contains gender-specific terms.
• Only list the requirements that are truly necessary. Did you know that men, on average, apply even if they meet only 60% of the criteria? Women, on the other hand, need to meet almost 100% to feel qualified enough to apply. The longer and more detailed the requirements, the more likely it is that your applicant pool will be strongly gender-biased.
• Highlight inclusive benefits such as shared parental leave and flexible working hours (more on this shortly).
• Avoid insisting on a degree from a prestigious university or an Ivy League school. There are many reasons why someone might have attended a less renowned college, and these are not necessarily related to intelligence, skills, or work ethic. In fact, large companies like IBM and Google have completely done away with college degrees as a requirement, as they do not reflect performance.
• Avoid insisting on an 'English-speaking' candidate (or a candidate who speaks the language in which your company primarily operates). This excludes candidates who are fluent in the language even if they did not grow up with it.
• Avoid technical jargon and unnecessarily complicated phrasing. A tool like Grammarly can tell you how readable your job posting is.

Our own research confirms the results from Glassdoor: 76% of all job seekers and employees consider diversity an important factor when choosing employers and job offers. Therefore, your job posting should explicitly express your appreciation for diversity and inclusion and provide examples of how it is implemented in practice.

5. Using diversity as part of your employer branding

Are people from different backgrounds featured on your social media channels, in your recruiting videos, your marketing materials, and other external communications? If not, you could unintentionally discourage candidates from underrepresented groups from applying.

Representation often precedes imagination. It is easier to see oneself in a certain role or company when one sees people who resemble oneself and are successful in these positions. However, if your workforce mostly looks the same, behaves the same, and thinks the same, there will be few opportunities to authentically showcase the existing diversity in your company. Realistically, this step may need to happen later, as it is absolutely crucial that your diversity recruiting efforts do not appear forced.

Once your other strategies successfully expand your talent pool and you welcome more and more new faces, perspectives, and backgrounds into your company, look for opportunities to incorporate these new voices into your employer branding channels.

6. Develop and Communicate More Flexible Company Policies

Do your company policies – even unconsciously – rely on certain assumptions about the life circumstances of your employees?

Statistically, childcare in heterosexual partnerships is still predominantly managed by women, and during the pandemic, women took on even more childcare responsibilities. If your company has overly rigid attendance rules or does not allow for flexibility (whether through hybrid work models or flexible vacation policies), this disproportionately disadvantages women, which in turn can affect your ability to hire or retain women in the company.

It is just as possible for Christians and everyone who celebrates Christmas for cultural reasons to allow all employees to take time off. But do you also give your Muslim, Jewish, or Hindu employees the opportunity to take time off on their religious holidays? If not, you should reconsider your policies. At IceHrm, we offer flexible vacation days so that our team can observe religious or cultural holidays at any time, even if they are not officially recognized.

When implementing or revising a policy, make sure as many people as possible can share their opinions. People from different groups and with different experiences can reveal problems that you may have overlooked. Once you are confident that your policies are inclusive, highlight them in job postings.

Why should candidates from different backgrounds choose your company? Because you care about treating everyone equally and your company policies prove it.

7. Proactively Offer Support

This point is particularly relevant for applicants with disabilities, but it also applies in other cases. Applicants from underrepresented groups are more likely to apply to your company if you show that you actively strive for inclusion and accessibility. Simply ask whether they need support to make the application process accessible.

Examples include wheelchair-accessible building access, a sign language interpreter for deaf applicants, or an accessible parking space near the building.

Important: Only ask about special or additional support needs when inviting applicants for an interview, not on the application form. Ask only after you have made your initial selection, as otherwise there is a risk that unconscious or actual bias could influence the selection process.

8. Use Job Boards to Find Underrepresented Candidates

Don't limit yourself to posting your job ads only on LinkedIn and other major job boards. Did you know that there are also job portals specifically aimed at candidates from underrepresented groups?

Here are some examples:

• Pride Careers is a job board that focuses on diversity.
• Hire Autism is a job board for people on the autism spectrum.
• Recruit Disability is a job board for people with disabilities.
• Honest Jobs is a job board for people with a criminal record.
• Pink Jobs is a job board for LGBTQ+ individuals.
• TransWork is a job board for transgender and non-binary job seekers.

9. Offer Internships for Underrepresented Young People

Many young people and university graduates obtain internships through connections, whether through family or their university. Since many internships are unpaid or very poorly paid, they unfortunately disproportionately go to people from privileged backgrounds and socioeconomic groups who can afford to work for little or no money.

If you want to attract diverse candidates, you should offer internships or entry-level positions to underrepresented young people who have just graduated or are about to graduate. And by ensuring that these positions offer a living wage, you open doors for talented young people that might otherwise have remained closed to them.

Don't know where to start? Reach out to local colleges, universities, or community groups and ask for their opinion. They may be willing to help you develop a program together, or they may already have programs you can join.

10. Practice fairness in hiring

Fair hiring is a hiring practice aimed at protecting formerly incarcerated individuals and those affected by the justice system from discrimination. Since December 17, 2019, the Fair Chance Act has prohibited most employers in the U.S. from asking applicants about criminal records before making a conditional job offer. However, the broader concept of fair hiring goes beyond this.

By focusing on the individual potential of each candidate, you not only expand your talent pool with qualified and loyal employees, but also give a wide and promising audience a second chance while simultaneously strengthening your community.

Next steps: Improve your company through more diversity

From employee retention to customer satisfaction to revenue – diversity benefits your company on all levels. We recommend implementing the strategies mentioned above before posting your next job opening. You will find that when you open doors for others, new opportunities also open up for you and your company.

Diversity recruiting is a strategic necessity that requires a fundamental shift in hiring philosophy, backed by the right tools and policies. The strategies discussed—from minimizing unconscious bias and creating inclusive job posts to offering flexible work options—are critical for attracting a modern, high-performing workforce. IceHrm's Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is designed to support the implementation of these inclusive practices from day one. It helps standardize interview questions and the overall hiring process (Strategy 1), enables efficient posting to multiple diverse job boards (Strategy 8), and facilitates objective team collaboration during the selection process (Strategy 3). By leveraging the streamlined, transparent, and automated workflow of IceHrm, HR managers can ensure their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion is consistently executed, leading to a broader, highly qualified talent pool and a stronger organizational future.