Two Key Components when Creating a Diversity Recruitment Strategy
If you’re in talent acquisition or a human capital manager looking to develop your first diversity recruitment strategy or even if you’re looking to upgrade your current diversity recruitment strategy to meet the needs of your growing company, at Jump Recruits, we’re here to help.
Before we show you How to Build a Diversity Recruitment Strategy, it’s critical that you turn your attention to two precursors. These two components—Internal/Self-Awareness and External Empathy— will have a tremendous impact on your ability creating a diversity recruitment strategy for your organization.
And, when done right, it’ll help your organization grow, learn, operate, and ultimately innovate within a dynamic heterogeneous work environment.
Unfortunately, a diversity recruitment strategy, alone, will not create this dynamic and innovative heterogeneous work environment unless you and your leadership team have a deep and thorough appreciation for the following two components:
Component 1: Internal/Self-Awareness
Before you start any diversity initiative, it’s imperative that you have a clear understanding of your own biases and perceptions. It’s also valuable to understand the differences and similarities among stereotypes, prejudices, and discrimination. As a bonus, once you’re aware of your biases and perceptions, try to distinguish what stereotypes, prejudices, and discrimination’s you hold AND how they show up in your interactions (or lack thereof) with others.
Having a basic—if not a fully reflected—understanding of how your perceptions and biases inform your perspective, the stereotypes you hold, prejudices you carry, and the direct (or indirect) discrimination you perpetuate personally is the foundation to any diversity-related strategies you create and implement professionally.
What many recruiters and human capital executives fail to realize is that while diversity is paramount to corporate innovation and often heavily influences company bottom line figures (increased by 30% per employee according to Deloitte). A diverse workforce starts within the circle of influence of corporate leadership.
If you haven’t fostered diversity within your circle of influence, then fostering diversity within your organization will be that much harder because it’s new to you. You’re doing something for the first time and expecting to lead the entire organization.
It’s hard to lead an effort inside an organization that you’ve never successfully accomplished in your own life.
So, it’s also important to realize diversity recruiting isn’t a one-time initiative. While it starts with recruiting, for your recruiting efforts to be truly successful, you need to integrate and embrace diversity within all levels of your organization.
This all starts with you. The internal self-awareness and self-reflection will help you distinguish what stops may prevent you from diversifying your circle of influence. Once you make this leap in your own life, supporting your team to make that leap will prove a much smoother process.
Component 2: External Empathy
Self-reflection on diversity and diversity-related issues may quite likely lead to new conversations and interactions with different people— people outside of your current circle of influence.
It’s when we’re externally facing, that we have an opportunity to get to know different types of people and to most importantly, practice empathy.
External empathy is what allows us to offer compassion, support, and understanding to other people.
Empathy is not pity, it’s compassion and understanding
Its also why intentionally diverse workplaces are so successful.
Everyone’s opinion is informed by their experiences, values, and beliefs. And by having empathy, compassion, and understanding for those differences you learn to appreciate the opinions of others. While you may not agree with the opinion, you can respect and appreciate it as a part of someone else’s experience.
The ability to empathize with someone who is different than you are and to respect their opinion as a part of their experience is a high-level skill that will inform the success of any diversity recruitment plan you create within your organization.
It’s this ability to empathize with compassion and understanding that creates intentionally headed discussions—conflict— but when everyone is working on the same team a well-designed diversity recruitment strategy teaches employees how to take many ideas and mold them into one new idea, something no one could have created alone.
This is the innovation you seek.
To create this level of innovation, your task is first, to seek to understand not to be understood. Listen for the sake of listening and not to speak.
Learn to respect other people’s opinions as biproducts of their experiences.
Second, practice respecting other people’s opinions as unique, informed, and supplemental to yours—even if you disagree. Because an opinion you can’t stand may —when combined with your unique experiences and opinion—inform the next big innovation in your life, on your team, or in your organization.
That’s the power of empathy.
Once you complete the pre-work discussed above in Components 1 and 2, you’re ready to build the perfect diversity recruitment strategy.
Are you tired of a haphazard diversity recruitment strategy? Are you ready to craft the perfect diversity recruitment strategy to lead your organization into the next phase of innovation and success?
JUMP Recruits created a 4-part how-to guide to get your organization moving toward developing a strong diversity recruitment strategy.