Everything you need to know to make your recruitment more inclusive, from the big benefits to our inclusive recruitment checklist…

Despite DE&I being a major draw for professionals across the consumer product sector and beyond, it’s still something that organisations are struggling to implement effectively within their hiring process.

This inclusive recruitment guide will tell you everything you need to know, from key definitions and obstacles to the solutions that can help you solve your inclusive hiring problems:

• What is inclusive recruitment? 
• What are the benefits of inclusive recruitment? 
• Your 5 step inclusive recruitment checklist. 
• Solutions to 4 inclusive recruitment challenges. 
• Making your recruitment more inclusive. 

What is inclusive recruitment?

Inclusive recruitment is the processes you put in place to remove bias and ensure fairness in a recruitment process. A strong approach to inclusive recruitment will impact the way you source, engage, assess, and hire candidates, and enhance diversity at all levels of your organisation.

Improving your approach to inclusive recruitment will help you attract people from more diverse backgrounds, regardless of factors including gender, race, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or socioeconomic background.

Inclusive recruitment is a key part of boosting DE&I in the workplace:

• Diversity means valuing and promoting a workplace culture that respects and appreciates individual uniqueness.
• Inclusion is about creating an environment where all individuals feel welcomed, respected, and valued.
• Equity is the process of addressing systemic barriers that disproportionately affect certain groups, to create a level playing field.

But, while 61% of UK employers have a formal DE&I policy, according to research by CIPD, just 32% of organisations are ‘very or extremely active in their efforts to recruit more diverse candidates across the board’. And, at the other end of the scale, ‘a similar proportion (30%) are not active at all’.

What are the benefits of inclusive recruitment?

Diverse working environments give employees a sense of community, boost engagement, and create a positive culture in which individuals can thrive.

As a result:

• Inclusive companies are 1.7 times more likely to be innovation leaders.
• Inclusive teams make better business decisions twice as fast.
• Diverse companies are 1.8 times more likely to capture new markets.

So, what can you do to achieve these benefits for your business?

As well as our inclusive recruitment checklist, you’ll also find some solutions to four key inclusive recruitment challenges below.

Your inclusive recruitment checklist

Follow this comprehensive inclusive recruitment checklist to avoid missing anything essential:

1. Assess your job descriptions: Screen your job descriptions and job adverts, make sure they are clearly written and free of unnecessary jargon, remove gendered language, and assess the requirements to ensure they aren’t unnecessarily prohibitive.
2. Diversify candidate sourcing: Actively seek out candidates from diverse backgrounds or from a wider variety of sources. You could, for example, seek to source candidates through education institutions, careers fairs, and on LinkedIn.
3. Assess candidates inclusively: Ensure multiple people are involved in the decision-making process to remove bias, offer reasonable adjustments for interviews and tasks, and offer flexibility wherever possible.
4. Remove bias from candidate selection: Introduce unbiased recruitment techniques to your selection processes, including anonymous shortlisting and competency questioning. These approaches will allow you to compare candidates in a like-for-like way without bias.
5. Elevate your employer brand: An inclusive employer brand (AKA employer reputation) will bring more diverse candidates to your business. Check out our six tips for creating an inclusive employer brand, which include defining your values, providing internal training, and improving external comms.
6. Monitor your diversity initiatives: Ensure you’re getting the results you want by defining which inclusive recruitment metrics you want to monitor and carrying out regular reviews.
7. Seek support: If you need a hand, consider reaching out for third-party DE&I support. We are inclusive recruitment experts within the consumer product space, so drop us a message if you think we can help!

These steps will help you ensure that inclusivity is prioritised at every stage of the recruitment process.

Solutions to 4 inclusive recruitment challenges

There are some common roadblocks organisations might hit when it comes to implementing or improving DE&I in recruitment.

Here’s what they are, and the practical steps we can help you take to overcome them…

1.      Overcoming unconscious bias

We all have unconscious biases. But, by implementing robust systems, you can ensure those biases (for example, affinity bias, halo effect, and confirmation bias) don’t influence your organisation’s hiring decisions.

CIPD have found that only around a quarter of employers take the necessary steps to remove bias from their recruitment processes. These steps can include inclusive language job ads and job ad testing, as well as more objective methods of candidate assessment.

By far the most effective approach to alleviating bias includes fully anonymous and interactive shortlisting. The methods that we at The Advocate Group employ have been honed over more than a decade, and offer employers key capabilities, including:

• Anonymous and interactive digital shortlists and LiveList functionality, so you can compare top candidates based solely on experience, potential and ability.
• Assess competencies prior to meeting.
• Assess cultural alignment through behavioural/psychometric analysis.
• Enhanced and inclusive external comms.

For more information on how we can help consumer product organisations like yours combat unconscious bias in recruitment, drop us a direct message. Our free expert resources are often the best place to start!

2.      Improving talent pool awareness

Awareness of talent pools is essential to making informed hiring decisions. It’s far harder to implement effective DE&I measures without an in-depth understanding of the talent available to you.

That’s why we’ve invested heavily in big data solutions that allow us to effectively map markets based on specific criteria, like demographics, experience and location.

The benefits of this approach can be game-changing for employers:

• Understand diversity within your available talent pools – remember, you can’t hire what isn’t there!
• Understand the volume and relevance of talent available to you, based on tailored criteria.
• Find, engage, and attract passive and inactive talent.
• Uncover niche, in-demand and/or underrepresented professionals.

Access to this sort of in-depth, insider knowledge won’t just help you improve diversity in your organisation; it will also give you an edge over your competitors.

3.      Boosting employer brand

As we mentioned above, employer brand shapes how your organisation is perceived by both current and potential employees. If, for example, your organisation isn’t as diverse as you would like it to be, your employer brand can highlight your commitment to getting there.

But elevating and effectively communicating your employer brand can be a big ask.

It is possible to do this in-house. However, if you want to ensure maximum impact, then we offer services through our internal Marketing team that can make that happen:

• Dual-branded recruitment campaigns.
• Innovative video content created exclusively for your brand.
• Newsletter feature to 20K+ engaged consumer product professionals.
• Targeted candidate attraction campaigns.

With tailor-made, targeted content, it’s possible to improve the perception of inclusivity in your organisation while you take other practical steps to diversify your workforce.

4.      Transparency

One of the greatest barriers organisations face to inclusive hiring is a lack of transparency among key stakeholders.

We see a lot of cases where employers have inclusive hiring policies that aren’t always communicated or acted on effectively. This is backed up by additional research from CIPD. They found that, while 67% of organisations say they follow objective assessment criteria when hiring, just 28% actually train their internal interviewers on legal inclusivity obligations.

That’s why a detailed stakeholder meeting at the very start of the process is essential for any hiring project. This ensures everyone is aligned on key requirements and nothing crucial is missed.

And, when external talent partners are involved, it also means more effective representation, stronger results and added value.

Making your recruitment more inclusive

As well as being consumer product recruitment experts, we’re also specialists in inclusive hiring…

So, if you want access to anonymous, diversity-balanced shortlists, in-depth demographic insights, employer brand promotion, and a direct line to underrepresented or in-demand talent, we can help!

Drop us a message, give us a call, or follow us on LinkedIn for more expert insights on inclusive recruitment and much, much more:

Call us: 0333 772 7200

Email: workwithus@advocate-group.co.uk