How to Identify and Remove Barriers to Diversity from Your College Recruitment Process
College recruitment teams know how important it is to curate diverse hiring pipelines. But sometimes, barriers to diversity – such as archaic role requirements or biased assessments – make their way into the hiring process, limiting the talent pool and unintentionally creating an uneven playing field.
In our September Talent Talk – our monthly panel series where we discuss pressing topics in college recruitment – we heard from Kristina Coppolino, Kristin Nichols, and Joel Vazquez, three D&I leaders in the campus recruitment space on how to make college recruitment more inclusive. Watch the panel replay below or read our highlights for the key takeaways, from leveraging data in order to identify areas for improvement, to practical tips for implementing better processes.
Panel Highlights
Recognizing Unintentional Barriers to Diversity
Even with the best of intentions, barriers to diversity can emerge throughout the hiring process. Figuring out those barriers within your organization is a key component to moving the needle on representation in the long term. Here are several things to look out for:
Recruiting only from elite institutions and Ivy League Schools
These institutions are predominantly white and often lack socioeconomic diversity. If you are directing the majority of your recruitment efforts to these colleges and universities, don’t be surprised if your pipeline reflects the lack of diversity seen at these schools.
Tip: Download our guide to recruiting at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and our guide to recruiting at Hispanic-Serving Institutions.
Be wary of technologies that can exacerbate bias
Take note of the personality and game-based assessments you may use during your interview processes. While these seem helpful, if they are skewed for a culture “fit” and a particular personality or answers that people from different backgrounds and cultures may not choose, it might remove qualified, interesting candidates from the process.
Check that your recruitment marketing is inclusive
Be aware of how you’re advertising your organization for potential new hires -- if you are tokenizing your few diverse employees in the advertising, or treating entire overlooked communities as a monolith rather than embracing intersectionality, diverse candidates are likely to notice and be turned off from your organization.
Getting Rid of Unintentional Barriers
Once you’ve identified some of the ways you might be unintentionally excluding candidates, how do you address the issues and make lasting changes?
Write job descriptions and assess based on what you want to hire for
Creating job descriptions and assessing candidates based on results and skills rather than years of experience or prestigious internships can open up the applicant pool to a much wider range of candidates. When interviews take place, be sure the questions and evaluations are standardized. And when hiring decisions are made, hold yourself and the organization accountable by identifying why you are hiring some candidates and not others. Be sure it’s based on ability to do the job, rather than intangible ‘feelings,’ which can often disguise bias.
Bring empathy into your process
Especially in our virtual world, it’s important to understand that candidates come from different circumstances and have varying access to technology, professional spaces, or career preparation resources. Especially for candidates at the entry-level, be proactive about providing guidelines for what to expect at the different stages of your interview process, and tips for navigating virtual interviews.
Continue to leverage data to find areas for improvement
Even when putting in the work to break down barriers and build a diverse workplace, there is always room for improvement. Track representation at every stage of the pipeline, from the top of the funnel all the way to offer rates and retention. And don’t just stop at quantitative data – gather anecdotal feedback from candidates who were both hired and not hired to understand where your inclusion efforts are falling short and how you can improve.
Making adjustments – no matter how small – to your college recruitment process can make a big difference when it comes to increasing access to opportunity. By identifying how you can make your process more inclusive, you can build stronger teams and a more diverse company over time.
