Building a diverse workforce has become a priority for a lot of organizations in today’s recruitment landscape. Despite this, a lot of people are still unsure of what this actually means and why it’s even important. To cover this, we sat down with Caroline Therwath-Chavier, who has over 10 years of experience in tech recruiting, to learn more about effective strategies for recruiting diverse talent and encourage more inclusion in the workforce.
Valentina Behrouzi
I'm Val, one of the Marketing Managers here at Teamtailor, responsible for our Global marketing. I love talking about candidate experience and how we can strive to make hiring more inclusive.
Before putting a plan in place to build a more diverse workforce, it’s important to actually understand why you’re doing it and why it matters. To define diversity and inclusion, Caroline explains that ‘diversity’ refers to what makes your workforce different, for example, gender, race or background. Inclusion refers to the how–how do you ensure that everyone feels valued and included, what tools or processes do you have in place to achieve this? These two things combined are what create an environment where differences are celebrated.
Once you understand what diversity and inclusion is, it’s then important to understand why it matters in the workforce, Caroline highlights three key reasons why companies should be focusing on diversity:
Each of these factors bring their own importance to the overall argument of building a more diverse workforce, proving that it’s not just about meeting a specific quota, but creating a more innovative and inclusive workplace, which will lead to more value for the business as a whole.
Having experience with recruitment herself, Caroline has a lot of experience in sourcing and retaining underrepresented talent and breaks down how to do so in a few proven strategies:
Attracting diverse talent:
With upcoming legislation, such as the EU Pay Transparency Directive, requiring companies to disclose salary information, Caroline feels optimistic about the future of diversity and inclusion. Requirements like this will help reduce pay discrepancies between age groups, genders and other underrepresented talent.
Despite progress like this, there’s still the acknowledgement that change can be slow and that a lot of companies still have a lot to do to move their efforts towards diversity forwards. Caroline always mentions that aligning leadership with goals for diversity is one of the most important things for driving this change and that arguments should be backed up with data and concrete insights from success stories as this can help get leadership on board.
Building a more diverse workforce isn’t a quick or simple change and requires ongoing commitment, however, equipped with the understanding of why it matters, companies can begin to put the effort in place to make the change.
Being intentional in your recruitment and more importantly, training your internal teams are both key to fostering more inclusive environments.
Caroline recommends resources like Mind the Gap by Susy Levy and Reconstructing DEI by Lily Zheng for further insights into the world of diversity, equity and inclusion. For this and even more advice, listen to her episode of Happy Recruiting! On your preferred platform below.
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