Inclusive Recruitment Marketing: 5 Best Practices for Hiring Diverse Talent

We live in an era where the need for diverse hiring practices is more imperative than ever. Organizations with diverse workforces are far more likely to stick out from their competitors and retain the most talented professionals. That’s the reason inclusive recruitment marketing has become the ultimate tool for reaching the best candidates out there and offering them a strong employee value proposition. But let’s see what exactly inclusive recruitment is and the benefits it brings to the table.

What Is Inclusive Recruitment?

Inclusive recruitment is every process and practice a company employs to attract and appoint diverse talent to vacant positions. By opting for inclusive hiring processes, you get access to different perspectives and experiences. Also, you embrace varied qualities, which in its turn, boosts productivity among employees and results in business profit. Diversity of employees, especially in upper management roles, is a synonym for business innovation, enhanced creativity, and long-term growth.

Most recruiters mistakenly think that inclusive recruitment stops at hiring people with disabilities or candidates from minority groups and underrepresented backgrounds. But the truth is you shouldn’t treat diversity as another box to check. The quest for diverse teams is about bringing different backgrounds and perspectives together. This type of recruiting provides your organization with a wide range of viewpoints and ideas, which can eventually translate into optimizing your products and services.

5 Inclusive Recruitment Marketing Best Practices

Hiring the right people from diverse backgrounds won’t happen overnight. Inclusive recruitment marketing requires that you set up the appropriate procedures to attract qualified candidates from a diverse talent pool. The practices listed below will serve as a starting point for your brand to dive into inclusive recruitment marketing and match diverse talent to their dream job.

Leverage an Omnichannel Recruitment Approach

Diversity in your target audience isn’t limited to job advertisements or LinkedIn posts. Instead, it should include diverse outreach methods. When you leverage one channel to access talented individuals, you end up narrowing down your recruiting options. On the contrary, different channels help you reach diverse demographics, thus expanding your candidate pool.

Social media have proven to be effective in reaching out to broader demographics. It goes without saying that you should focus on LinkedIn job postings since it’s the go-to place for every individual looking for professional growth opportunities. Ensure you target diverse talent through inclusive language and benefit from the platform’s advanced analytics to optimize your posts. Social media don’t end with LinkedIn, though. Other platforms like Instagram or Facebook could be equally effective in targeting diverse audiences, resulting in expanding the reach of your offerings.

Recruitment email marketing is another surefire way to inspire qualified candidates to apply for your vacant positions and nurture them along the interview process. Emails help recruiters establish one-on-one conversations and build trust with potential employees. Robust ESPs like Substack and popular Substack alternatives allow companies to personalize email content based on data like the candidate’s aspirations, seniority level, former employment types, and more. That way, you are able to address their unique needs and improve their candidate experience.

Create Inclusive Job Descriptions

After figuring out which platforms fit your inclusive recruitment marketing, it’s time to create the copy for your job vacancies. Unfortunately, many recruiting professionals don’t realize that their job descriptions make a last percentage of their candidate pool feel excluded. So, how can you avoid falling into this common trap?

If you want to broaden the reach of your job advertisement, you need to remove gender-based language and criteria. Language hurts, so ensure yours is clear of stereotypes to avoid making applicants feel uncomfortable. Eliminate any masculine or feminine words or even gender-related hints – and that goes for the job title, too. You should opt for gender-neutral phrasing instead.

Also, stay away from industry jargon that could frustrate people who aren’t familiar with your sector’s terms. The criteria you set for the position must be clear and focus on the responsibilities rather than the requirements. To facilitate dyslectic or visually-impaired readers, divide your copy into short sentences, use bold to highlight specific details, and leverage large fonts and precise wording.

Add Inclusion to Your Employer Brand

Potential candidates need to be aware of the ways in which your brand celebrates diversity. Publicize your inclusion efforts so that diverse talent notices your company. Be transparent about your progress in supporting diversity, even if you aren’t where you’d like to be. Communicate how you commit to inclusive recruitment to different audiences and channels. Let them know why you prioritize diversity and the initiatives you take to succeed.

Your employer branding combined with inclusive recruitment practices shows how your company values diverse skill sets. You could start promoting your employer brand with the career page on your website. Think of this page as a window into your company’s values. As such, it should feature content that showcases your commitment to diversity and inclusion. To showcase authenticity, share real videos, photos, and testimonials of diverse employees at work instead of using stock imagery.

Also, consider creating social media content or blog posts to show how people from diverse backgrounds are able to grow within your business. And don’t forget to mention benefits and perks that resonate with different candidate groups to motivate them further.

Create Diverse Interview Teams

The most efficient way to show you put theory into practice is by having a diverse team conducting the interviews. Inclusive hiring teams validate that your company truly honors diversity. Candidates who go through the hiring process highly appreciate engaging with people from diverse backgrounds. When your interview panels are made up of diverse talents, it provides your organization with several benefits.

First, you create an inclusive environment for candidates where they feel comfortable knowing you are accustomed to employing people like them. Also, such a team brings new perspectives to the process, asking the right questions and staying away from inappropriate ones. With a diverse interview panel, you can rest assured that your interviews are free of unconscious biases. After all, we’re all vulnerable to this type of prejudice. A diverse interview panel is the first step toward avoiding a similar situation.

To stand out from your competitors, consider going beyond your recruitment team and having people from different departments within the company join the interviews. You should always look for ways to bring new team members into your recruitment cycle and use their unique experiences and viewpoints to further refine the process.

Build an Accessible and Inclusive Career Website

We already discussed the content you should put on your career page. But one player can’t save the entire team, right? The future of web design goes hand in hand with accessibility standards, and your website should embrace them no matter what. If your career website isn’t accessible to all users, every thought of inclusive recruitment marketing goes down the drain.

Your website is the ideal place to demonstrate your commitment to inclusivity guidelines. To promote your efforts toward an inclusive workplace, here are the most crucial web accessibility standards to implement on your website:

• Use bulleted lists, headers, and visual components to support visitors with reading or vision disabilities. These elements facilitate screen readers to navigate through your content.
• Opt for real images of your diverse team instead of stock photos that tend to enhance homogeneity and sabotage your inclusion efforts. And whatever you do, add alternative texts for your images for users with screen readers to access them.
• Don’t limit yourself to text but utilize different content types like videos and audio files. Also, include captions and transcripts for this type of content so that users with hearing difficulties can consume it.
• Ensure you leverage proper color contrast between your content and its background to help visitors with visual impairments grasp different design elements
• Add components like accordions to hide content that could distract users from your call-to-action and the core content you want them to focus on

Final Words

As a recruiter, you need to review your hiring process to make sure you don’t exclude diverse talent. Inclusive recruitment marketing can make an actual difference in embracing and promoting diversity within your business. Even if you don’t have the luxury of building everything from scratch, you can start by tweaking some basic elements.

The inclusive recruitment marketing practices listed in this guide can serve as your starting point to work your way toward hiring diverse talent. However, every organization requires a unique inclusive recruitment marketing strategy. So, you should check what works best for your candidate pool. More importantly, use your applicants’ feedback to refine your hiring process and create the most inclusive candidate experience possible.

Authors

Maria Fintanidou

Maria Fintanidou works as a Content Writer for email marketing automation software Moosend, having created the Help Articles (FAQs) and overseen the platform’s translations in Greek and Spanish. She loves exploring new cultures and ways of thinking through traveling, reading, and language learning.