How to Create an Inclusive Recruiting Process on a Budget
For any organization looking to build an inclusive workplace, recruiting and hiring are vital starting points to increase diversity and create a foundation of systemic equity. However, building inclusive processes can be time and resource intensive. Typical recommendations of investing in partnerships to expand sourcing efforts or training interviewers on bias traps with outside consultants 一while helpful一may not be as accessible for small organizations that depend on their internal teams to do the work.
What does Inclusive Hiring look like on a budget? We have a few easy tips:
Differentiate Between Requirements and Preferences
As you are evaluating candidates, consider how you are defining competency. Remember that pedigree or credentials are not always an accurate indicator of ability and often gatekeep individuals with non-traditional experience and qualifications. To avoid this bias trap, start by expanding your internal definition of competency and potential performance to focus on skills and aptitude over pedigree. Reflect this shift in your job descriptions by differentiating between requirements (skills) and preferences (e.g. degree level). Integrate these throughout your evaluation rubrics and interview processes by allowing candidates to discuss their qualifications based on their unique experiences to ensure interviewers are equipped to evaluate folks with diverse professional and educational backgrounds.
Move from “culture fit” to “culture add”
To expand your pipeline of candidates, move away from “culture-fit” language within the interview process. The most efficient way to ensure culture add is to see when a candidate's answers align to your organization’s values. While working collaboratively is important, staff don’t necessarily need to “fit in” to do so -- and in fact, bringing in different perspectives can be crucial not just to creating a more inclusive culture but a stronger organization overall. Often, those considered the “best fit” are the ones that have access to things like internships, education at elite schools, and professional connections -- which not everyone has access to. And hiring for “culture fit” can lead to homogeneity which we know isn’t good for business.If you want to ensure that staff are values aligned, integrate behavioral based interviewing questions (more on those below!) that focus on a way that the candidate has put an organizational value into practice in a past role.
Incorporate Behavioral Interview Questions at the Interview Phase
Behavioral-based questions -- essentially asking candidates to describe the way they’ve behaved in past jobs with specific examples -- are great to incorporate into your interview process. They can help the interviewer better understand how the candidate thinks and solves problems and can be deeper and more specific than traditional interview questions (and you can already see what’s on their resume!). When preparing for interviews, we recommend that about 60% be behavioral-based questions and the other, 40% technical or position-specific questions. You can also tie behavioral based questions to organizational values. If trying to assess flexibility, we might ask “Give me an example of a time when you were working on a project and for some reason had to stop and start again. How did you handle it?” Find more behavioral questions here.
Educate Your Team on Bias
Ensure that your interviewing team is educated on bias -- through internal L&D, external workshops or even required reading. Interpersonal and systemic bias can have massive effects on the candidate experience and the quality of the teams you create.
We hope that these tips help your organization create a more equitable and inclusive recruitment process. If you’re in need of more support, ReadySet offers workshops on Inclusive Hiring,Interpersonal and Systems Bias and we can even audit your interview process itself. Don’t hesitate to reach out to us!