While many organizations are taking steps toward diversifying their workforce and making the labor market more inclusive for all through formal and informal policies, there is still much more progress to be made to better support traditionally underrepresented talent. And as more members of Gen Z — the most diverse generation to date — continue to enter the workforce wanting to see themselves better represented at all levels of a company, the need to improve D&I policies will only continue to grow. In fact, we found that 75% of internship and job candidates would reconsider applying to a company if they were not satisfied with its D&I efforts.
In our October Talent Talk, we invited three female talent executives to discuss diversity in the workplace and how recruiters can make even more progress on meeting D&I goals. This panel features insights from Toya Hall, the director of talent recruitment at Uncommon Schools, Cindy Diogo-Kociuba, head of talent acquisition at Rangle.io, and Frannie Melegrito, head of recruiting at Haven Technologies.
Keep reading for some key takeaways our panelists shared during the discussion. You can also find the full recording of the panel here.
Before you start implementing new D&I-related strategies, you should first take the time to ensure that you and your team understand the challenges that both you and your peers are facing today to support traditionally underrepresented talent, and determine whether your existing strategies are hitting on those points. For example, you might want to attend diversity panel discussions and learn from experts in the field about what they have been experiencing, and take the time to submit questions about how to tackle those issues in your specific industry.
In addition to learning more about the D&I space, you should also conduct research about your own workplace policies to identify potential obstacles that might be keeping under-represented individuals from applying and succeeding at your company. You could do this by examining the language in your job postings and updating them to be more inclusive, and asking candidates through surveys and interviews about how you can improve the interview/hiring process.
To truly build a strong pipeline of traditionally underrepresented talent, you need to take the time to build relationships with candidates from varying backgrounds and allow them the opportunity to forge genuine connections to your company. One way to do this is to increase the diversity at the start of your funnel — your interns! By ensuring that your intern classes are made up of students from different backgrounds, you’ll be able to foster those relationships until program participants are ready to look for employment full-time. The key is to remain in contact with interns and continue to offer them support throughout their college careers.
After offering remote work settings due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many companies began to realize the barriers that physical location can introduce for top talent around the world — but especially for candidates with multiple responsibilities, such as working parents, those caring for the other family members, and those who could afford to move to an expensive city for work. And a large number of those organizations never looked back.
Looking forward, it’s important to continue to recognize that offering candidates flexible work arrangements, such as hybrid or remote work, can allow you to tap into talent pools that would have otherwise been untouchable, and introduce new opportunities to students who may have never considered the possibility of working for a company across the country.
There’s no better time to brush up on your understanding of D&I challenges in the workplace, take a hard look at your intern class, and take a step back and evaluate your written and unwritten workplace policies that may be hindering traditionally underrepresented talent. And by doing so, you’ll be even further down the path of helping to increase inclusivity in the workplace, and invite more talent to explore their potential. In addition to these tips for how you can strengthen your D&I strategies, you may also want to learn more about traditionally underrepresented talent searching for jobs today, which you can find in our latest report, “Diversity in the Workplace.”