Improve Your Diversity  Recruiting Success Cathlene Johnson bio l email

Diversity recruiting brings a set of complexities organizationally and individually that make it distinct and different from traditional recruiting. Diversity recruiting is complex for many individual recruiters, recruiting teams or organizations for many of the following reasons:

• Some cultural change may need to occur within the organization to ensure the success of diversity recruiting
• Diversity recruiting requires a shared vision about diversity and its importance to the organization.
• We may assume that diversity recruiting is something that every recruiter can do and knows how to do.
• Tools and resources for recruiting and sourcing diverse candidates are poor.
• Diversity recruiting may involve a process of organizational and individual shift/change of beliefs, behaviors and/or perceptions.

With all these complexities there has to be a strong motivation to make diversity recruiting work. To improve your recruiting successes start by establishing diversity recruiting performance measures.

Performance Measures for Diversity Recruiting

Two ways to look at diversity recruiting measures include:

• Recruiting Performance
• Organizational Performance

What prevents your individual recruiter, recruiting team or organization from recruiting a diverse employee base?

The key question to ask yourself, in determining recruiting or organizational measures is: What prevents your individual recruiter, recruiting team or organization from recruiting a diverse employee base? This unique question will lead to a unique set of answers and measures for each recruiter, recruiting team or organization.

Excuses are prevalent for the lack of diversity at many organizations. Performance measures provide the foundation for the individual recruiter, recruiting team or organization to address the diversity complexities. Thus eliminating excuses, providing focus and impacting the efforts and affects of diversity.

A very simple method for developing performance measures for recruiters and organizations related to diversity requires a wiliness to look at what prevents your individual recruiter, recruiting team or organization from recruiting a diverse employee base. The story of what happens to diverse candidates must be captured as they go through the recruiting process. This story becomes the foundation by which performance measures are developed.

Tell the Story about Your Process

Look at the measures that tell the story of what happens to diverse candidates as they go through your process. Looking at each step of the process through the diversity lens, ask these questions of your process:

• How far do diverse candidates make it through the process? Do diverse candidates get in the door? Are diverse candidates interviewed by telephone and/or in-person by recruiters and/or hiring managers?
• At what level are diverse candidates hired in the organization?
• Are diverse candidates accepting offers from the organization?
• How would you describe the quality of the diverse candidates that are brought into your search process? Are they quality diverse candidates or just diverse candidates?
• What is the relationship between diverse candidates and the organization?
• What are recruitment’s most important functions related to diversity recruiting?
• Is your recruitment process inclusive or exclusive of diverse candidates?
• What is the impact of your recruitment message to diverse candidates?
• What is the impact of diversity recruitment programming on hiring diverse candidates?

Tell the Story about your Recruiter or Recruiting Team

The second measurement for diversity recruitment tells the story about your individual recruiter or your recruiting team. Ask the following questions about your recruiters:

• Is the recruiter’s sourcing strategy inclusive of diversity specific sources?
• Are diverse sources being effectively utilized?
• Does the recruiter engage diverse candidates, sources and organizations?
• Does the recruiter maintain contact with diverse networks? I so, what are they?
• Does the recruiter have an understanding of the pool of diverse candidates in your industry, position, and location?
• Does the recruiter have a clear strategy for recruiting diverse candidates?
• Are recruiters developing diversity recruiting capabilities among their hiring managers?

Your Story & Performance Measures

Your story becomes the evidence for how to improve your diversity recruiting process. Your story reveals practical things about the process that you can implement that will allow your organization and your recruiters to make necessary improvements. Understanding your story organizationally and the story of your recruiting team will allow you to make choices about developmental activities for recruiters, understand what is and is not working and how to best allocate resources.

For example, your story may have revealed that your recruiters do not use or utilize diversity specific sources. Examples of performance measures may include:

• Identify and include a diversity specific source for each position.
• Identify, join and become involved in a diversity specific professional association.

Performance measures can be as informal as an expectation or as formal as a performance objective in a performance review and planning document. These performance expectations and measures become what we want our recruiters and organization to do and become. Setting performance expectations and measures to diversity recruiting increases the value of activities related to diversity recruiting and what we measure, becomes valued and what we value, gets done.