In recent years, organisations are creating diversity hiring strategy to enable them deliver diversity recruitment goals as a embedded DEI strategy.

Over my career, I have coached teams to directly source for and hire diverse candidates into professional and leadership roles.

Diversity Hiring Strategy

In most cases, companies are well intentioned to make progress with their diversity hiring strategy. They form a dedicated team and utilise diverse sourcing channels.

But often, these initiatives lack the commitment and focus to be able to drive impactful actions.

Hence, for these activities to be successful, it is important to enable an inclusive environment for all forms of diversity to thrive.

So before embarking on a diversity hiring strategy, let’s begin with inclusion during the hiring process – from CV review, interviews and feedbacks from all interviewers.

Inclusive Interview

Inclusive interviewing means that hiring managers and interviewers are actively challenging their unconscious biases to fairly assess candidates throughout the interview process.

This means that interviewers are using facts and objectivity, not assumptions, to make hiring decisions.

Unconscious bias could influence interviewing and hiring decisions.

Some of these biases could be our associations with different observed characteristics such as age, ethnicity, gender, including people’s tone of voice or accent.

Every day we hear about instances where unconscious and conscious biases are having an impact in our society. These situations affect people.

And they often have negative impacts on the experiences for both employees and customers.

Conscious Inclusion

Conscious Inclusion helps all employees to understand their own biases.

It also helps people consider the impact of biases on those around them.

Having this awareness is relevant. But what is more positively important is learning how to intercept our biases.

By intentionally being more curious and not relying on one’s assumptions, leaders enable an environment where differences are appreciated and people are genuinely included.