Recruitment Blog

JobAdder and Social Talent present: Diversity hiring

Guest Author

Recruitment Expert

As recruiters, employers and employees, we’re all familiar with the term ‘diversity hiring.’
But how best do we go about making diverse hiring choices and what are some of the obstacles that get in our way?

Social Talent hosted an evening of short talks at JobAdder HQ from some highly-distinguished members of the recruiting world to tackle these kinds of questions for recruiters.

The speakers and their chosen topics were just as varied as the subject matter itself, here are our favourite pieces of advice from each speaker.

“Let’s get the personality back into recruitment” – David Macciocca, CEO of VideoMyJob

While the average job ad can easily be overlooked, David’s video interview platform VideoMyJob allows recruiters to create engaging, personalised video job ads.

Video job ads cast a much wider net than traditional, written job ads and therefore are more likely to be seen by – and attract – a diverse pool of candidates.

One company recently used VideoMyJob’s platform to produce their first ever ad in sign language, a prime example of how ads like this can be used to include and appeal to job applicants of all backgrounds.

“Making work a more human experience” – Natalie Goldman, CEO of FlexCareers

Natalie spoke insightfully about the topic of unconscious bias and how it can unwittingly seep into our decisions from even the most unlikely of triggers.

An incredible story about how auditory information was used to make a biased decision shed light on the fact that as recruiters, we must make every effort to silence those factors that may lead us or others to make unfair judgement calls about candidates.

This extends to when we see biased behaviour in clients or when we receive biased briefs.

While we may be obliged to meet a biased brief, we can also use it as a chance to put forward excellent candidates that fall outside of it in an effort to counter bias and champion diverse talent that deserves consideration.

“We are a high-consequence industry” – Charles Cameron, CEO of RCSA

Charles is passionate about tackling assumptions and old-school perceptions of the recruitment industry.

As recruitment professionals, we have the utmost responsibility to guide people into the right employment choices and be Ambassadors for fair practice. As Charles put it, part of this responsibility is changing biased buyer behaviour.

Charles emphasised that the best ways for us to do this is to create diverse employment ecosystems and to be leaders in tech. As a lot of people fall into recruitment from other industries, well-established recruiters have a responsibility to foster and be inclusive of newcomers, as well as to be open to new ideas for continuous improvement.

“Belonging in your job” – Holly Fawcett, Curriculum Development Director at Social Talent

Speaking from experience, Holly perceptively pointed out that there is no exact correlation between a strict number of years of work experience and the quality of a candidate.

A candidate with 7 years of experience is not profoundly better than one with 6 years of experience, but listing restrictive job requirements in a job ad does exclude groups of talent. In the spirit of fostering diversity, we must make efforts to remove unnecessary barriers to entry.

Holly also revealed gender-coded language that can be littered throughout job ads without us even realising it. Ads with masculine-coded words such as ‘confident,’ ‘bold’ and ‘assertive’ can inadvertently put women off applying for roles as they may unconsciously feel that their values do not align with those of the company.

Lastly, Holly encouraged companies to be aware of having a balanced mix of acquired diversity – difference of experience and mindset, and inherent diversity – differences in factors such as race and gender that make us all unique.