In order to ensure optimum recruitment of professional staff, HR department needs to reassure that their hiring process is free from unconscious bias while promoting the selection of potential talents irrespective of gender, age, or ethnic background. That being said, HR leaders should provide candidates with an inclusive recruitment strategy.
Inclusive recruitment is the process of hiring and recruiting individuals as well as connecting hires to their job through understanding and valuing different backgrounds and opinions. The aim of inclusive recruitment is to eliminate bias and to build harmonious diverse workplace that considers more than just gender or race.
See also: Recruitment Dilemma: Guidelines for Hiring Overqualified Candidates
Different from other modern hiring strategies, inclusive recruitment cannot be automated. It is because this kind of recruitment process requires empathetic and careful thinking that technology like AI doesn’t possess. Each hiring process requires different thinking and questioning to make sure you are doing the best to attract the best candidates regardless of gender or race.
In short, inclusive practices refer to processes and programmes in place that help you nurture acceptance, respect and understanding among employees so that a harmonious workplace environment can be cultivated.
In recent years, diversity within organisations has become an agenda in most boardroom discussions, as cited in a handbook on Inclusive Practices. Multinational companies have been the front-runner on inclusive practice due to the presence of diversity in employee demography. Commonly, the diversity most employers notice are age, gender, religion, race, and physique. While in fact, there are more invisible diversity employers should notice such as nationality, sexual orientation, professional experience, background, language, social class, values, skills, beliefs, and more. In the inclusive recruitment process, human resources should be mindful of all these differences.
For example, as stated in the Online Inclusive Recruitment Guide, when writing a job description, a recruiter should be mindful with the naming like businessmen because it might refer to gender inclination. So, a business leader can convert the word into gender-neutral titles such as business manager, executive, or head of business. Another example is specification in experience or usage of active/energetic phrase which can be considered as discriminating certain type of group such as disabled people.
In order to improve the recruitment strategy, leaders need to eliminate “discriminating phrases” and create a more inclusive recruitment process by following these fair employment practice.
Organisations are encouraged to obtain only the information pertinent to the job scope during recruitment. For instance, by ensuring that your job advertisement is not discriminatory (age, gender, and race are not specified).
In addition, job applications form and an online selection tool used to profile talents dimension should not list too specific information and qualifications or experience. In contrast, you can ask for these specifics during a face-to-face interview and upon confirmation of appointment.
HR department, as best as possible, should maintain different employee group throughout the selection process. You should eliminate biases and ensure that at least one representative of a minority ethnic group is present in the final selection of candidates. This helps you with the selection panel which focuses on job-related attributes when making recruitment-related decisions.
To eliminate discrimination in relation to employment practices, HR should actively monitor relevant HR processes that all employee decision made are based on objective information. You could conduct regular audits to make sure that the Equal Employment Opportunity policy has been implemented and administered in the areas of compensation, benefits, transfers, layoffs, returns from layoffs, training and social recreation programme.
Read also: Skill vs. Talent: Why You Should Change Your Focus of Recruitment
