The goal of any hiring manager is to find the best fit for the role and the company. But many recruiters and hiring managers are likely to find that they might miss out on top talent, even when they have the best of intentions
Unconscious bias can prevent workforces from seeing the full benefits of diversity. That’s why having a diversity hiring policy is so important. Diverse hiring policies require everyone to address their biases and provide checks and balances to ensure the right candidate is truly chosen.
What does it mean to truly add diversity to the recruiting process? Here’s what you need to know.
Diversity Benefits Everyone
The benefits of diverse organizations are increasingly well defined. Diverse teams offer a wider pool of skills, talents, and experiences, which lead to increased innovation and productivity.
Everyone from the C-Suite to the intern program benefits from a diverse team.
However, diversity rarely happens organically. Even saying, “let’s build a diverse company” won’t achieve it because everyone has what’s called unconscious bias.
What Stops Diversity from Occurring
Very often, hiring happens based on gut feelings and a hiring manager’s experience as well as the job description. However, hiring based on a gut feeling or without actively considering diversity and inclusion can lead to hiring using an unconscious bias.
An unconscious bias, or implicit bias, is an underlying attitude or stereotype that you may unconsciously attribute to someone who is different from you in some way. It can affect how you engage with them, even if you don’t realize it. And unconscious bias can work in a multitude of ways.
Unconscious bias is more prevalent than conscious bias: everyone holds unconscious beliefs of some type. So, it’s important to have a system preventing unconscious biases from impacting your work in the form of a diverse hiring policy.
How to Start with Diversity Hiring
Diversity hiring doesn’t require you to pick out candidates based on individual attributes that a candidate can’t change, like their gender or ethnicity. Instead, creating a diverse hiring policy and program helps identify and reducing potential conscious and unconscious biases that may impact your sourcing, screening, and hiring of candidates.
Only when you uncover, identify, and find a mechanism for combatting those biases can you truly start to hire the best candidate for a job and start to see a more diverse company.
Work Together to Overcome Bias
Everyone has unconscious bias; it’s what you do to move past it and keep it out of your recruiting process that counts. And only when you use a diverse recruitment policy will you start to truly enjoy the benefits that come along with a diverse company.
Contact TekCom Resources, Inc. Today
Are you looking for help with hiring? Working with a recruitment partner can be part of a strong strategy to mitigate the effects of unconscious bias. Get in touch to learn more about TekCom’s unique hiring strategy within telecommunications and network infrastructure.
