If you want an agile and innovative team, then you want a diverse range of opinions and viewpoints. Whilst this is not up for debate and sounds simple enough, we can all find it hard to look beyond the barriers of our own experience sometimes, and to consider something, or someone, new.
Using a specialist recruitment consultant to aid you in your search for a new hire simplifies the process, gives you the knowledge of experts in their field, and represents a real terms cost saving to your business. Not only this, but it also means that you may find yourself interviewing candidates that you or your team might not normally have spotted amongst the pool of the ‘similar and familiar’.
At CK Group all our recruitment consultants are highly trained experts, which includes annual workshops on preventing unconscious bias in the recruitment process. Our team are trained to find you the right skills for your business as well as enhancing your team.
If you are looking to build your team in the future, here are 3 considerations to encourage a diverse and inclusive range of candidate applications and in your selection process:
Applicant Accessibility
The first port of call for all candidates when researching your company or applying for jobs is your company website. Take a look at your website from the perspective of candidates with visual and hearing impairments. Load it up not only on a computer but other devices. Does it load well on a mobile phone? Now consider the text. See if it can be enlarged, and consider if you can integrate a screen reader into your website so your candidates can listen to the content.
If it’s not feasible for your business to integrate a screen reader, you can also create videos to sell your company and current vacancies to your candidates. There are a range of products out there at various price points. At CK Group we use an award-winning video
tool to advertise our roles and start a conversation with our candidates.
Job Advert Review
Once you have reviewed how physically accessible your job advertisement will be to candidates, it’s also worth looking at the wording of your adverts to ensure that the language and phrasing being used are not unwittingly excluding any skilled candidates.
At CK Group we review all of our job descriptions and adverts for gendered or racial language and phrasing. We will do the same for your business, but there are also lots of resources online discussing this topic and giving examples and advice.
Anonymous Applications
You have now received candidate applications from a wide range of backgrounds and it’s time to start shortlisting based on the skills they have to do the job. One way that you can prevent stigma and bias at this part of the selection process is to anonymise your applications.
At CK Group we can anonymise candidate CVs to various degrees depending on the circumstances and your preferences. This can include the removal of:
- Candidate name and age
- Personal pronouns
- Specific details of their entitlement to work
- University institutions and locations
- Other location data unrelated to the role
This gives you the freedom to know you are selecting the best candidates for the job regardless of unrelated factors such as gender or racial background.
Diversity in the supply chain
Your bonus tip is a reminder that taking a proactive approach to diversity and inclusion does not only have to be limited to what your business does. It also includes the type of suppliers and other businesses you engage with.
At CK Group we are critical of our own practices, running a D&I Working Group quarterly to seek employee feedback and ideas, but we also take the diversity and inclusion of our suppliers seriously. We consciously support suppliers and others businesses taking an active approach by choosing to do business with them.
What do you think of these ideas? Do you have suggestions of your own?
If you want to learn more about how we can support your diversity & inclusion initiatives, or just want to chat further about any of these suggestions, you can start the conversation with us today by emailing Naomi Menary at CK Group nmenary@ckgroup.co.uk
To learn more about Diversity & Inclusion:
