The Importance of Building a Diverse Candidate Pipeline
You posted a new job, now how do you fill the pipeline with diverse talent?
As a recruiter who has been working in the diversity and inclusion space for 8+ years, I have seen the full spectrum of challenges and triumphs in this type of work. I’ve worked on hiring diverse teams for a massive corporation and with smaller startups. Each type of company has its own unique challenges when it comes to building out their DEI strategies, but the incentive is often the same: not only is it the right thing to do for the health and well being of their employees, but it can also be greatly beneficial for building better products and services (a diverse team can and will build products and services that work for a wider range of customers).
As more and more employers have committed this year to making their company culture more inclusive, they are struggling to find ways to make their teams more diverse. Regardless of company size, industry, or mission, I have always seen that this work truly begins with recruiting diverse talent. We’ve written tips on how to diversify your engineering team, but here are a few reasons why intentionally building a diverse candidate pipeline is so important:
Employee referrals don’t build diverse teams.
We all love referrals, don’t we? There is a reason why so many companies attach a financial incentive to employee referrals. It feels much safer to hire a candidate whose work has already been vetted by someone you trust. Plus, you don’t often have to work as hard to close a candidate who already has insider information about how awesome it is to work for your company. Referred candidates also tend to have longer tenures at companies, which saves quite a lot of money for your recruiting budget.
So what’s the issue? We tend to have a strong bias toward referrals: employee referrals only make up about 7% of applicants, but they comprise almost 40% of the talent that gets hired. Since employees tend to refer people they know personally (or people that they have worked with in the past), those referrals can be pretty homogenous. Studies have shown that employee referrals overwhelmingly favor white men over people from any other demographic group. Employee referrals will only increase the diversity of your team if you have an incredibly diverse team to begin with.
Applicants may not be diverse, either.
Large, well known companies tend to get thousands of daily applications from a wide range of people all over the globe. Even though these companies have large teams of recruiters, they don’t have enough people to sort through all of the applications, meaning they are frequently missing applicants from different types of backgrounds. On the other hand, smaller companies that don’t have the same brand recognition tend to get applications from people who are just outside of that company’s network. These applicants will find your website through a friend of a friend, a networking group, or a LinkedIn posting.
In either case, many applicants from historically excluded demographic groups tend to be discouraged from applying if they can’t see themselves fitting into your company. If your employer brand isn’t inclusive, you may have a more difficult time attracting applicants from a wide range of backgrounds. If your job descriptions are too rigid, you will also have fewer opportunities to hire from a diverse applicant pool. Studies have shown that women are much more selective when it comes to applying to a role and will only apply if they meet 100% of the requirements (while men will apply if they meet 60% of the requirements). There are tweaks that you can make to your website and to your job descriptions to attract more diverse applicants, but you should not be relying on applications alone to build a diverse team.
Be intentional with your sourcing.
As we’ve established above, passively hoping to get a diverse pipeline through applications and employee referrals won’t always work. Even your typical sourcing methods can produce less than stellar results: algorithms on candidate search platforms frequently rank candidates based on your network and the number of clicks they are getting from other recruiters. On top of that, platforms like the LinkedIn Talent Network will only show you the first 1000 results from a search, meaning you can miss out on a wide variety of candidate profiles that fit your search criteria.
The best way around these restrictions is intentionally seeking candidates from underrepresented groups. Looking for Black talent? Adding Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) to your search string will pull up a more refined search. Creating search strings that are tailored to organizations for Black, LatinX, women, LGBTQ, and veteran talent will help you connect with a wider range of people. Setting aside some time each week to search for and reach out to candidates from each of these groups will greatly expand the diversity at the top of your funnel, which can lead to diversity in your hires as well.
Hiring underrepresented talent takes intentional pipeline building.
Of course, a diverse pipeline is only the beginning when it comes to creating a more diverse and inclusive workforce. You still need to put effort into building an inclusive and welcoming interview process, and you’ll need to foster an internal culture that will allow you to retain employees from all backgrounds. That being said, being intentional at the top of the funnel is a very important first step, and it can help focus your efforts in making a truly diverse team.
We specialize in building diverse pipelines for all types of roles. Contact us to see how we can help you act on your intention to build a diverse team!
