Recruiting diverse candidates is top of mind for many recruiters—and for good reason. The value of various life experiences, mindsets, and cultures cannot be overstated. Recruiting diverse candidates allows organizations to make connections with all manner of people, creating a healthy company image and office culture simultaneously. 

Actually finding quality candidates that help you meet your diversity goals can be difficult. Often, you’re looking for specific qualities but can’t find exactly what you need. In this piece, we’ll go over a few ways to make recruiting diverse candidates a smoother process.

Reevaluate Your Job Description

When sourcing traditionally, your first instinct may be to make it clear exactly what you’re looking for. Significant experience in a relevant field, an uninterrupted job history, and related skills that make the mentoring process easier may be the first things on your list. 

If you’re prioritizing diversity, you want to prioritize mindsets and people over checking off boxes. Consider rewriting your description, and lessening the requirements to allow for a more diverse candidate pool.

Emphasize Inclusion

One of the first steps you need to take when recruiting for diversity is a review of your policies and office culture. When candidates reach the final stages of the recruitment process, hearing glowing praise of your organization’s work-life balance can make the difference between a hire and a drop-out. Here are a few ways to build an inclusive workplace culture: 

• Giving your employees the day off on major religious holidays that they observe is a good first step to showing employees that they’re valued, no matter their views. 

• Work-life balance is more important than salary for many people, and COVID only strengthened that priority. Making work hours/shifts more flexible allows your teams to feel more in control of their work lives.  

• Make it clear that advancement is common, and expected for those who go above and beyond. 

If your HR employees genuinely love working for your organization, they’ll wholeheartedly recommend you to candidates. You’ll bring in more high-quality candidates, and raise retention.

Source Outside Your Industry

Asking for experience specific to your industry has a secondary downside of cutting out those with experience in related industries. If you’re looking for an applicant with sales experience, those with extensive customer interaction and communication histories could easily have what it takes. 

Transferable skills and open minds can make any applicant into a great employee. Re-skilling an employee who has a passion for their work is always better than a bad hire that checks off the experience boxes.

Make Use Of Candidate Referrals

An effective candidate referral program can make a search for candidates short and sweet. According to a Forbes report, referrals are the best source of superior candidates — and it’s not close. Taking advantage of your current A-team can not only help you meet your DEI goals but get you talent that sticks around. 

Offering incentives to employees who refer their connections can bring qualified candidates your way fast, so it’s important to make the incentive program known. Make the rewards substantial enough that people are excited to refer. The resources your company will save in the long run will far outstrip the incentive rewards.

Utilize Job Ad Placement Software

Traditional job aggregates have their uses, but job boards that target the groups you want to hire can make recruiting diverse candidates a breeze. Finding these job boards isn’t always easy, however, and calculating the optimal way to source on these boards can be even tougher. 

Utilizing AI ad placement software can make the decision a breeze. It automatically places your advertisements based on your candidate diversity requirements. In combination with PandoExchange, our network containing hundreds of job posting sites, you’ll have a diverse candidate pool in no time flat.