8 Diversity Recruiting Strategies To Bolster Hybrid Workforce

Diversity is the buzzword, especially in the era when recruitments happen based on age, gender, color, disabilities, and sexual orientation.

According to a report by Templeton, tech is the most difficult area to recruit diverse talents. Only 19% of UK specialists are women and 17% in Europe. Only a few of them are likely to grab leadership roles in tech.

What’s the reason?

Poor diversity recruiting.

Often, remote and hybrid employees struggle with bias because hiring managers and recruiters make a decision based on their judgment even when they are conscious of bias.

To help you crack diversity recruitment strategies, we have put together this article to answer all your questions.

What does diversity recruiting mean?

Diversity recruiting is about reducing bias based on a candidate’s age, gender, sexual orientation, and other personality traits that change the hiring decision.

Yet, most people think – diversity recruiting is about increasing workplace diversity.

Not really.

It boils down to two things: reducing bias in your screening, interviewing, and onboarding process, and injecting values into your organization that nurture and create a safe space for new recruits.

Here’s an example:

During the screening process, the recruiter selects an LGBTQ+ candidate (without knowing their gender) based on the score on the anonymous assessment test.

What diversity recruiting is not?

If you search on Google, you’ll find multiple answers to “what is diversity recruiting.” But, it’s important to be clear on what it’s not:

Reverse discrimination

This means you hire employees only based on color and gender.

Diversity recruiting targets candidates based on their color and gender. But, selects candidates based on skills and diversity.

Giving handouts

A diverse workplace is not about offering favors or special treatments to the lower sect of employees.

It ensures removing roadblocks for their employees and gives them an equal position.

Lowering the quality of hires

Often, recruiters give up on the quality of hire to create an ecosystem of diverse employees.

But, the key is to acknowledge their attitude and skills first, and diversity later.

Why diversity hiring is important for hybrid teams?

Before jumping into diversity recruitment strategies, let’s understand why diversity hiring is important.

Resonates with customers better

A diverse hybrid team comes with similar values and visions of the organization.

When employees and organizations think the same way, they can serve the customers better.

Brings higher profits

Ethnic and culturally diverse executive teams with the top 25% of talent were 33% more likely to outperform on profitability.

Employees from different cultures bring their ideas – which when heard, become your happy employees – multiplying into an engaged remote workforce and achieving higher business profits.

Adds more perspectives

By bringing employees from different backgrounds and cultures, you enable different perspectives.

This fuels creative ideas and in turn amplifies innovation.

How to create a diverse hiring strategy?

Wondering how to recruit a diverse remote workforce?

Experiment.

Use diversity recruitment strategies that other companies have seen success in. Merge them with your experiments and create a customized strategy.

What are these strategies?

Let’s jump in and understand.

Bring diversity in employment options

Diversity = gender, race, and color (to most organizations!).

While diversity depends on team members, their geographical location, and their sexual orientation, you also need to add variety in employment options.

Co-founder, and head of Marketing, Iliya Valchanov says: “At 3veta, we have a specialized in-house team who works on the projects while we also team up with freelancers. They work as an extension, bring their specialized knowledge, and carry the workload – while the in-house team focuses on other strategic tasks.”

So how to find diverse freelancers to add to your team?

Rely on referrals from your network. Or, channels like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Slack communities are great resources to connect with experts.

Create hyper-focused job descriptions

Writing a super-targeted job description is part of diversity recruitment strategies.

Yet, many recruiters fail to do this.

• Many job descriptions do not highlight the location – remote, hybrid, or on-site – which brings in candidates interested in working remotely.
• Talk about your company, values, mission, and why the candidate should apply for the role. When you highlight the values you have in your organization, you attract diverse recruits – who are a culture fit too.
• If the role needs working or reporting to a manager, tell who the person will be working with. Give them the background of this person, their role, and the values they abide by. This works as an icebreaker for the new recruit to understand their manager before working with them.

Take a look at how Fireflies.ai highlights this in their job description.

Why does this work?

Fireflies.ai talks about their values. They highlight benefits like “work remotely anywhere in the world” which encourages candidates looking for a remote job to apply.

They focus on benefits like no boss culture and LGBTQ+friendly that tell the candidates how welcoming the company’s culture is.

Multiply active sourcing with networking

Active sourcing is when recruiters leverage different channels to source new hires.

By combining networking and active sourcing together, you can find quality candidates and build long-term relationships with them.

Here are 2 sure-shot ways to execute it.

Partner with companies: Partner with companies in the same or complementing niche as yours that align with your mission, vision, and values.

Sponsor events together. Invite people to attend the event and encourage networking with teams from different companies.

Host an open house: Organize a private gathering with food and drinks.

This is a good way to reconnect with your ex-employees and bond them with your present team members.

Or, you can conduct a virtual open house.

Send food and drinks to each attendee’s address – and connect over a virtual call to party and engage with each other.

Remove bias

With a hybrid team with employees from different groups, it’s easy to form bias – sometimes in the form of online bullying or not letting them raise their voices.

For example, in-office and remote employees may form in-groups that bring bias among team members.

That often results in taking authority over who gets assigned the projects and refraining access to must-know team discussions.

To break this team cohesion, see that each employee has access to all information – from team discussions to resolving the issues.

For marginalized employees in your team, it gets hard to be seen and heard leading to bias and conflicts.

So, create an ecosystem where all the voices are heard, and employees can make hard discussions productively.

Encourage healthy conflicts and give examples of what they look like.

Create a remote onboarding experience

Whether the new recruit has opted for an in-office or remote work option, create a consistent onboarding experience using videos and technology.

• Create short byte-sized videos explaining the walkthroughs on different software company uses and how to set them up.
• Provide a private seminar session where the new hire can ask questions or doubts they had after watching the onboarding videos.
• Enable a buddy system in your organization. When a new recruit joins your hybrid team, provide them with a partner – an experienced team member. This buddy partner becomes the go-to person for the new team member to ask any informal questions and company details.

Support learning and development programs

Create a learning ecosystem to upskill your employees – multiplying their growth and helping them get promotions without bias.

Few ways to do this:

• Organize weekly or monthly online learning sessions for your employees that work on a hybrid work schedule. This way they can learn about new subjects and engage in meaningful discussions.
• Sponsor courses and cohorts your diverse team members are interested in learning from.
• Create a company policy where you give monthly gift cards to employees specifically for learning. For example, offer Amazon gift cards through which employees can purchase ebooks.

Invest in tools supporting a hybrid environment

Using remote work tools in your organization is needful to achieve business goals and make your hybrid team’s processes simpler.

Many candidates use this as a filter while applying for jobs, especially when their role requires these tools.

When choosing the right tools for your hybrid workforce, make a list of your requirements.

Here’s a checklist for inspiration:

• Does the tool enable messaging?
• Does it allow us to schedule calls?
• Does it allow us to see the flow of ongoing projects?
• Does it allow us to conduct video calls without restrictions on the duration?
• Does it allow us to transcribe the video calls?
• Does it sync with our calendar?
• Does it allow us to sync and share documents with other teammates?

For each requirement, the tools are different.

Measure hybrid diversity recruiting KPIs

Have diversity recruiting KPIs in place.

Use these KPIs to measure the persona and success of your company’s hiring efforts.

Some important KPIs include employees based on location, gender, and employment mode.

However, you can customize the KPIs at your organization based on your values and vision.

For example:

3veta focuses on two KPIs when recruiting for diversity – demographics like geographical location and gender.

However, the primary factor while remote recruiting is the employee’s skills.

Geographical location: Since 3veta is a fully remote team, it has a remote recruiting system.

The team members are distributed in different locations – USA, Canada, Spain, UK, Italy, Germany, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Argentina, Morocco, and the Philippines.

Gender: About 70% of the people working on projects are female.

When we talk about diversity, it means an equal proportion of diversity in every department and every role.

The company has Katya (CEO and COO) and Masha (Head of Design) on the leadership team.

When asked about diversity hiring KPIs, Iliya says:

“It’s possible to lead diversity recruitment without KPIs. Following the mantra (hiring best people) and without following any specific KPIs, in my previous company, we realized that 15% of the company identified as LGBTQA+. The best part is that this made our remote team culture extremely inclusive as the team embraced our differences.”

How to create a virtual recruitment system?

Virtual recruitment is when recruiters conduct interviews virtually via skill-based tests or video calls.

Skill-based tests are usually part of the screening test, followed by virtual calls.

Here’s how you can schedule a virtual interview call with 3veta:

Step 1: Go to Meetings inside 3veta. Then, select Create and click on Schedule a meeting.

Step 2: Fill in the details – title, additional information, and duration of the interview, and pick the relevant date and time for the interview.

Select ‘Free meeting’ under the ‘meeting is paid by option. Now, click on ‘Create link.’

Step 3: Invite a candidate to interview. Fill in their email and send them an automated email with all the details about the interview – day, time, and a link to join.

Wrapping up

Many times, recruiters who advocate diverse workplaces end up making biased decisions unconsciously.

To avoid this, educate them about unconscious bias.

First, assess the diversity shortcomings and the factors you look at during the hiring process. Next, create a remote recruiting and onboarding system with 3veta.

Remember, inject values that make your organization the right culture fit for hybrid employees.

About the author

Nidhi Kala

Freelance SaaS Writer at Nidhi Kala

Nidhi Kala is a freelance writer for B2B SaaS brands in marketing, HR, and eCommerce. When she's not writing, her artistic mind is buried in creating a new journaling spread or exploring calligraphy scripts. Connect with her on LinkedIn.