Why Focusing On Diversity and Inclusion Is Your Best Move

A successful recruitment process requires a focus on a number of different factors. You’ll want to employ the proper technology in order to ensure your interviews run smoothly, while also ensuring that you’ve written a job description that will attract the right kind of candidates.

However, a conscientious hiring manager will also put an emphasis on diversity and inclusion in order to create a team that yields positive, innovative energy, while serving its customer base effectively.

A Gallup study, that was published in the Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, recently took a look at manager-employee race differences. They found that study respondents’ intentions to remain at their current position were the highest when the employee and managers were of different races and were working in an engaging workplace. In fact, the figures were even higher than when managers and employees were of the same race working in the same situation.

Additionally, a new report from Catalyst shows that increasing levels of female employment could boost a business’s Gross Domestic Product by 5 percent in the United States.

It’s clear that building diversity and inclusion in the office offers businesses a number of perks. Beyond just job satisfaction and increased economic opportunity, developing a team of employees from different walks of life and with different perspectives on the world enables the brand to innovate on a larger scale.

Let’s discuss the reasons diversity and inclusion should be a focus in your hiring process:

Innovative processes guide success

When you have designers who see the world in a very similar way, for example, it’s easy to end up with product lines that eventually grow stale. After all, these people have the same world-view and probably have similar influences. They can’t help but design based on this one narrow perspective.

Additionally, if you’re working in a customer service role and are tasked with troubleshooting for clients, your team is going to find it more challenging to attack the problem effectively when everyone is approaching the dilemma from the same mindset. That’s why having employees from a diverse range of ethnicities and beliefs enables you to serve your clients more effectively.  

Unfortunately, even a well-intentioned hiring manager can end up creating a cookie-cutter environment and not understand the importance of diversity in your office. At times this is due to personal biases that they aren’t even fully aware they possess.

In other instances the homogenization of a workplace happens because those tasked with hiring didn’t try hard enough to target a diverse candidate pool, so they ended up getting the same type of applicant over and over for the open position.

Instead of reaching out to different professional organizations and making them aware of the open position, they posted in the same forums or used the same hiring methods they had always relied on, thus providing them with the same kinds of job seekers they typically get when they’ve had open positions in the past.

Society demands inclusion

Major, popular companies have found themselves in hot water over diversity issues lately. Twitter, for example, recently came under fire when Leslie Miley, the only black engineer in a leadership position, announced he left the company after concerns about diversity and inclusion.

Miley wrote a post explaining that he asked a question about increasing diversity during an engineering leadership meeting. The brand’s Senior VP of Engineering replied by saying, “diversity is important, but we won’t lower the bar.”

Miley went on to have a one-on-one meeting with this executive and found that the individual drastically disagreed with his own take about how to track ethnicities of job applicants. This led Miley to question how the executive could, as Miley writes, “see himself as a technology visionary and be so unaware of this blind spot in his understanding of diversity.”

While Twitter may be an impressive brand in the technology space, it’s clear that this is still a concern businesses across all industries need to confront head-on.

While there are plenty of factors to consider as you move through the hiring process, such as the speed with which you conduct interviews, the kinds of technology you want to incorporate into your process, and how thoroughly your job description is crafted, it’s essential not to lose sight of the importance of diversity and inclusion as you’re hiring.  

Adding a broad range of job candidates from differing races, sexual orientation, and backgrounds allows for a collaborative and dynamic working environment.

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What are you doing to enhance inclusion and diversity efforts at your company?