While a large number of organisations are taking some steps to recruit diverse talent, only 52% have a formal diversity strategy in place, according to the CIPD Talent and Resource Planning Survey 2020.
If your company is considering, or is in the process of, developing a formal diversity strategy over the next 12 months, it’s important to ensure you have the tools in place to execute your strategy and measure its success.
What role does technology play in this, exactly?
Whether your priority is to address reducing unconscious biases in the hiring process or to develop a more inclusive company culture, it’s likely that the majority of your focus will be on a people-level. However, using the right recruitment technology can make the implementation of your strategy and reporting much easier.
Here are just a few ways that technology can help to power your diversity strategy:
Anonymising applications
When reviewing your candidates’ application forms, technology can anonymise certain details to ensure that all candidates can be reviewed equally. For example, our recruitment technology, Webrecruit ATS, assigns each candidate a unique identification number which can be used instead of their name when hiring managers review applications.
This ensures that all applications are treated fairly in the first instance and are assessed purely on their suitability for the role in question. At later stages within the recruitment process, for example when conducting interviews, we recommend providing training to your hiring managers to minimise the risk of bias.
Make your recruitment process more accessible
To reach a diverse range of people, you need to make sure that your hiring process is as accessible as possible. This includes all aspects of the process, from your application form right the way through to onboarding your new hires.
Some application processes include lengthy, paper-based application forms; a big disadvantage of these is that candidates will likely need a laptop/desktop computer to complete their application. By bringing your entire application form online, candidates can complete their submission on their mobile device, wherever they are.
When onboarding new candidates, recruitment technology provides an easy way for candidates to receive, sign and return their employment contracts and other onboarding documentation. For candidates unable to get to the post office to return documents or unable to spend money on postage, this could be a huge help.
Monitor your metrics easily
To report on the success of any strategy, you need an accurate way of measuring your performance. Technology can make it much easier to gather and track data and analytics relating to diversity and produce reports within seconds.
Set up equal opportunities questions in your online application form to gather the diversity information you require for each candidate. You can then report on this (anonymously) by department, application stage and location (particularly useful for multi-site businesses). You can also compare time periods to see the impact of your diversity strategy in both the short-term and long-term.
You can then use this data within wider reports on company performance to identify any patterns or trends.
It’s important to remember that using technology won’t automatically make your organisation diverse; it simply gives you the tools you need to make your diversity strategy easier to execute.
Want to find out more about Webrecruit’s recruitment technology, Webrecruit ATS? Book your demo today.
