3 Tips To Promote Diversity In Hiring

As businesses compete to excel in their industries, hiring the right kind of talent has become crucial for them. Diversity is one of the key hiring trends nowadays as the LinkedIn Global Recruiting Trends 2018 report shows that 78 per cent of companies see diversity as extremely important and 53 per cent have already adopted measures to improve it.

Hiring screening platform, HIREarci is an on-demand testing platform that enables HR and Hiring Managers to accurately assess a job candidate’s skills. According to an infographic released by HIREarci, McKinsey & Company Business Insights found that the companies in the top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity are 35 per cent more likely to have financial returns above their respective national industry medians.

The infographic highlights three tips for hiring managers to promote diversity:

1) Start Upstream

While companies often focus their diversity efforts on creating more inclusive in-person interview experiences for their candidates, they often fail to address the step in which the majority of candidate filtering occurs – the screening process. The screening process remains an abbreviated and inexact process for most companies, increasing the likelihood of biased selection at this step. Improving screening ensures a more diverse group of candidates downstream.

Tanya Johnson, CEO, HIREarci said, “Studies have shown that a more heterogeneous organization produces more diverse ideas and strategies and positively impacts the long-term success and performance of a company. Yet, it is hard to remove unconscious bias toward someone ‘like me’ while interviewing a candidate. One of the most effective ways to eliminate this type of bias is to use an application that provides on-line access to standardized test that assesses a candidate’s skills resulting in an objective assessment based purely on their merit. To be most effective and impactful, it is critical to apply these tools during the initial screening steps done by HR/recruiters. “

2) Screen on Skill

Companies often use alternative measures to filter candidates during the screening process. These proxies are good starting points, but fail to accurately measure the core capabilities of each candidate. Focusing on educational background, for example, can lead to some candidates getting more credit than they deserve, and other qualified candidates being overlooked. Screening on skill ensures that candidates are filtered on merit, while other optic biases are ignored.

3) Leverage Unbiased Content

Screening on skill, in theory, removes bias in the early stages of the recruiting process, allowing qualified, diverse candidates to flow through to the in-person interview stages. However, even companies that use skills based screening techniques, still rely on biased content. In fact, questions that are created by a company contain the inherent biases of the creator. Sourcing content from the crowd solves this problem by providing a wide variety of questions that are representative of the community as a whole.

Speaking about how HIREarci can help in the hiring process, Johnson added, “HIREarci is a simple, effective technical skills screening application for HR that enables you to screen a candidate based on their merit while removing unconscious biases (e.g., school they attended, race, gender, age, etc.). It also enables HR to do a more thorough and effective assessment during the initial screening of the candidate resulting in a more diverse, qualified group of candidates downstream. Given it is designed specifically for HR and other non-technical personnel, it eliminates the need for engineering to be involved in the early screening step. Organisations will also see a significant reduction (up to 40 per cent+) in the time and cost to hire.

HIREarci supports the major technology topics such as Java, JavaScript, Database, iOS (Swift), HTML, etc.