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What is Diversity Recruiting Software?
Diversity, inclusion, and equity (DEI) initiatives start with the company mission, develop via diverse recruiting practices, and flourish through inclusive employee engagement initiatives. Luckily, for companies and their HR departments and personnel, the diversity recruiting software and services field is booming. Diversity recruiting software helps HR departments, recruiters, and hiring managers design and manage diversity hiring initiatives to drive business impact. These diversity hiring technologies help companies build diverse teams by sourcing, retaining, and engaging candidates from underrepresented groups based on race, gender, veteran status, ethnicity, and so on. Keep in mind that this is a wide and growing field and not every diversity recruiting solution is equal. Some might focus on reducing unconscious bias by creating blind skills-based screening solutions, while others focus on increasing diversity in the talent pool by sourcing from underrepresented groups. The market for diversity and inclusion (D&I) tech solutions is expanding very quickly. As of 2019, the estimated global market size is $100 million but with companies doubling down on diversity, it shouldn’t be long before this HR technology hits $1 billion. D&I currently focuses on talent acquisition and analytics, but soon enough should be expanding to focus on engaging an inclusive workforce. Diversity will not flourish without focusing on inclusion and equity.
Key Benefits of Diversity Recruiting Software
- Support companies in improving their diversity hiring initiatives
- Remove unconscious bias from the hiring process
- Employ filters to redact any information that can impact hiring decisions
Why Use Diversity Recruiting Software?
Diversity and inclusion have quickly become a top priority for HR departments and recruiters alike. Research has shown time and time again that diverse workforces drive innovation and business growth. Diversity improves product development, inspires creativity, and increases revenue. Diverse companies perform better, and it’s high time to focus on making sure that companies are recruiting and engaging diverse talent.
Who Uses Diversity Recruiting Software?
HR personnel, recruiters, and talent acquisition leaders across every sector and industry are being tasked with increasing workplace diversity and inclusion. Many candidates are looking to join diverse teams and in a candidates’ market, their options are growing.
Kinds of Diversity Recruiting Software
Diversity recruiting software is a booming field that is just getting started. The following list includes a variety of diversity recruiting tools that may all be features of a single solution or may be additional features or add-ons to recruiting automation tools to help improve the recruiting process.
Eliminate unconscious bias — Some diversity recruiting software focuses on helping HR departments, recruiters, and hiring managers remove unconscious bias from the hiring process. Many solutions provide tools to redact personal identifiers from resumes such as name, gender, age, employment history, criminal background, university attended, and photo. Essentially, these tools hide information that is irrelevant to the job.
Blind pre-employment screening — Diversity hiring solutions may provide preemployment screening tools that focus on job-specific skills tests, performance audition challenges, or gamified recruiting tools to match candidates with the jobs they rate the highest for on performance outcomes. These solutions help companies make hiring decisions based on a candidate’s job skills and not whether they like them or think they will fit into the company culture.
Candidate evaluations — Some diversity hiring technology helps HR personnel and hiring managers create a streamlined and consistent candidate evaluation process. This helps reduce unconscious bias from the interviewing process by aligning interview questions and feedback forms to reduce biased interactions among interviewers and candidates.
Diverse candidate sourcing — This diversity hiring technology helps companies, HR departments, and hiring managers source candidates from underrepresented groups based on their skills as well as their ethnicity and gender.
Job description software — Some of these diversity recruiting solutions focus on helping companies and HR departments craft unbiased job descriptions. Research has shown that common words used in job descriptions often have either female or male associations and thus might be repelling or attracting candidates based on their gender. These solutions check job descriptions for pronouns, gender-charged words, and superlatives, verify the number of requirements necessary, and more.
Employee referral — Some diversity recruiting tools also provide employee referral solutions to help improve the talent pipeline by incentivizing employees from underrepresented minority groups to refer from their personal networks.
Job boards — Many job boards focus on providing a platform for candidates from underrepresented groups including African Americans, Latinos, LGBTQ+, women, formerly incarcerated persons, veterans, and more.
Diversity Recruiting Software Features
The features of diversity recruiting software are as diverse as the solutions themselves. As stated above, these include tools to help remove unconscious bias from the hiring process, diversify the talent pipeline, expand employee referrals, and employ broader job boards. The following are a list of features that might be found in diversity recruiting software.
Diversity sourcing — Identify top candidates from a variety of underrepresented diverse talent pools based on gender, race, ethnicity, and veteran status.
Unconscious bias — Identify, manage, and remove unconscious bias from candidate sourcing and interviewing processes.
Improve interview and review process — Manage the interviewing and reviewing processes to help HR personnel, hiring managers, and interviewers reduce unconscious bias, thereby creating a fair and balanced hiring process.
Data and analytics — Diversity initiatives need to be closely monitored for effectiveness. By collecting the essential data and analyzing it, diversity recruiting software provides companies and HR departments with transparency into diversity sourcing efforts.
Potential Issues with Diversity Recruiting Software
Improving diversity recruiting and hiring alone is not enough to diversify a company. If the inclusion and engagement of all workers throughout the entire company is not a priority, a workplace culture will inevitably remain unwelcoming, at best, to a diverse workforce.
Lack of support and buy-in — If diversity hiring initiatives are mandated by the C suite and put on the head of HR or a diversity and inclusion officer, the initiative will inevitably fail. There must be complete buy-in and support from the top down to truly improve DEI throughout the entire company and create an inclusive workplace in which all employees can thrive. When diversity is just about public-facing numbers or marketing ploys, no amount of diversity software or consulting will have a lasting impact on diversity in the workplace.
Blinded by elite universities and brand-name companies — Recruiting efforts, for tech in particular, have traditionally been focused on elite schools and top tech companies. To expand and improve diversity recruiting initiatives, HR personnel and recruiters need to seek out talent pools beyond the top colleges and companies. There is an abundance of talent from non-elite schools and nondegree programs like coding bootcamps that must be tapped to diversify the talent pool. Even having a bachelor’s degree as an essential qualification is detrimental to the talent pool and diversity initiatives.
Overworked HR personnel and recruiters — Recruiters and HR personnel tasked with hiring essentially function like salespeople. These personnel are tasked with filling a specific number of roles as soon as possible to earn commissions and meet goals, thus they go with what works and what they know. Unless CEOs empower the HR department to build a recruitment process with diversity as the main goal, recruiters may not be incentivized to take risks by trying newer methods of building their talent pool.
Lack of clear ROI — Without a clear ROI, it can be difficult to build or expand diversity hiring initiatives. What HR directors, diversity and inclusion officers, HR personnel, and recruiters don’t know will hinder their efforts. They need to understand how their diversity hiring efforts translate into improving diversity throughout the company. They need the data, they need to understand it, and they need to use it.
