Your company has a team monitoring your finances on a day-to-day basis, right? That's a standard business practice. Leaders should approach their diversity, equity and inclusion goals in the same manner. If teams aren’t monitoring their DEI metrics as regularly as the finance team, they're at risk of missing business goals.
Organizations that prioritize DEI are almost two-times more likely to meet or exceed financial goals, according to a 2021 Deloitte report.
Implementing a strong DEI strategy isn't optional. To move the needle on building a more diverse workforce, organizations need to listen to those from historically excluded groups and tailor the hiring experience to be more inclusive. Plus, to counter the unconscious bias that all humans have, companies can take extra measures to help ensure a fair and equitable experience for candidates from HEGs, such as implementing AI capabilities or anonymizing resumes.
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Forty-seven percent of organizations have implemented technology to help reduce unconscious bias in their recruiting and hiring, a recent report from Talent Board and iCIMS found. Although 53% have not implemented such technology, one-third of them plan to do so in the future. These practices can help to boost organizations’ DEI results when done correctly.
So what’s the problem? Well, many organizations don’t have visibility into the impact of their efforts to build a fairer hiring process. The Talent Board and iCIMS report found that 52% of employers have not used diversity-related data or analytics beyond what is minimally required for EEOC compliance. Many organizations lack the insights into their DEI efforts, or they have disorganized data that takes hours, days, even weeks to organize into a useful overview. Recruiting technologies can provide a comprehensive view into your hiring funnel, from sourcing to advancement, so you can identify where your hiring process could be more equitable.
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There are three main use cases for analytics that can help you improve your recruiting pipeline health and meet your DEI metrics:
- Set goals based on demographics. While 60% of organizations have diverse slate policies or diversity-focused recruitment and hiring goals, only 34% say their organizations set diversity-related goals or specific targets for recruiters and hiring managers, according to the report by iCIMS and Talent Board. To set yourself up for success, define your DEI goals by race, ethnicity, and gender so you can review the progress you’ve made. Suppose you notice you’re behind on hiring women in technical roles, as shown in your DEI funnel analytics dashboard. In that case, you can use your recruitment marketing platform to create a virtual hiring event and send dynamic, personalized email campaigns to nurture relationships with candidates after the event. Plus, you can use AI to support recruiters and help reduce the human bias in the initial resume review process by solely evaluating candidates by skills and experience.
Review the progress of your open jobs. Make sure you can view DEI hiring data by job so you can ensure you’re on track to bring diversity into historically homogenous departments or roles. For example, if you are looking to improve the ethnic diversity in your management positions, you can review the analytics and see which areas need more equitable hiring practices. Let’s say your finance department needs more heterogeneous teams. The problem? Qualified candidates from HEGs are dropping off after the interview stage, hurting your DEI goals. You might then decide to implement a candidate survey step after the interview process to find out what might be happening and address it quickly.
3. Get notifications and act fast. With analytics, you should be able to set up alerts to let you know if you are above or below your goal for a particular demographic. That way, you won’t even have to check the dashboard to see where you’re doing well and where your processes could use some attention. Take this hypothetical situation as an example. You want to hire more female BIPOC in technology roles but get a notification that the percentage of women that went through your screening to interview stages dropped. Now you can reach out to your sourcing team right away to ask them to focus their efforts to help.
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While having data in your applicant tracking system can help you identify areas to improve the candidate experience and reduce bias, it’s only one part of a broad set of DEI initiatives. Employers that want to become top DEI organizations need to put a plan in place to build an authentic candidate experience, reduce bias, retain top talent, and measure their efforts — at every step of the journey.
