Recruiting for Diversity : What the best in the business are doing

We've all heard about the list of Canada's Best Diversity Employers award, but have you ever asked yourself what makes a company a great diversity recruiter?

Here's a look at some of the winners of the 2011 Best Diversity Employers award, and what they're doing to excel at recruiting diverse candidates.

At BC Hydro, more than 16% of employees are visible minorities. Even better, more than 18% of managers are visible minorities. So what's their secret? Not only do they have recruitment strategies designed to increase representation of diverse groups, but they monitor their progress on a monthly basis to ensure those strategies are working. They also have a team dedicated to recruitment and retention of Aboriginal employees.

Of Bombardier Aerospace's 12,000 Canadian employees, almost one-quarter are visible minorities. Their strategy has been to develop in-house, specialized training for all recruiters to ensure a bias- and racism-free sourcing and screening process.

Corus Entertainment isn't a huge company, but 9% of their employees, and 11% of their managers, are visible minorities. A key pillar of their recruitment strategy is to ensure that all job vacancies are forwarded to organizations which represent diverse job-seekers, including the Canadian National Institute for the Blind and the Aboriginal Human Resources Development Council.

Loblaw Companies Ltd. has almost 100,000 full- and part-time employees in Canada, and 15% of them are visible minorities (14% are managers). Individual stores are encouraged to be active within their communities, participating in diversity-themed events and career fairs. They've also recently opened a 'reflection room' in their head office to meet the spiritual and religious needs of their diverse employees.

At Xerox Canada, 15% of employees are visible minorities. One of the ways they've fostered the recruitment of diverse candidates is to invest in a large Diversity Inclusiveness section on their website - it does a great job of welcoming diverse candidates, and sets the stage for long-term retention as well.

You may not be in a position to set up a 'reflection room' as Loblaw has done, of course. But take a look at your corporate careers section. Do you have a 'diversity' page, or are you just relying on the old-fashioned tagline "Women and minorities are encouraged to apply" at the end of your job posts?

Addressing a diverse audience – clear communication is key

My colleagues and I often get asked if we have any quick and easy tips for getting more views and higher conversion rates for job posts delivered to a diverse candidate base. To a certain degree there isn't a magic answer that will increase candidate flow just like turning on a tap.

Real success, we know only happens as part of a long term, organic, process. Increasing the SEO visibility of your profile and your opportunities, developing an awareness of your employment brand and getting industry related recognition about your organization (especially in amongst target groups) are all keys to the performance of your posts. Successful sourcing strategies are a bit of a numbers game and the more traffic you have, the more qualified applicants you will also have, regardless of conversion rate.

Having said all that though there are some commonalities to success that improve your posts SEO and improve conversions to posts no matter how many views you are getting. The key here for diverse audiences is, funnily enough, the same as it is for non-diverse audiences. Communicate clearly.

Far too often I see job titles that contain nothing but acronyms and short forms. There is a time and place for SMS style language but the title of a job post isn't one of them. A point made worse when company culture specific acronyms or terminology is used. And these sorts of things don't show up only in the titles of job posts but in the job description detail as well.

For a traditional “mainstream” candidate audience using company specific terms and/or SMS shorthand can be at the least off-putting but imagine how discouraging it can be for diverse groups who are more likely to be able to interpret the language and meaning of such posts.

At the end of the day the job posts are advertisements, just like the B2C or B2B advertisements your organization already uses. The concept of employment branding is real, better candidates will be attracted by a better employment brand. For all the employment branding activity you may do nothing will have as much impact as the “front-line” advertising you do, it’s your first point of contact with the target audience and first impressions are lasting ones. That's why clearly written job posts are so very important.

A job title and description that are well, as in clearly, written are easy to understand and will attract more candidates. They are also a better reflection on your organization as an employment brand and that's the kind of value that will pay off when candidates are more invested in you as a potential employer, giving your opportunities a longer, better look and more likely to share your opportunities with their own network.

Want to Hire? Focus on Fundamentals

The goal for any diversity recruitment initiative should be, of course, to actually hire more diverse people but it's not always easy to get there. Especially at a time when the internet has become such an everyday occurrence for everyone. It's not just diversity recruitment that has this issue but any recruiting, sourcing and hiring.

Why?

Well, as many companies have discovered the "real-time" nature of, and the creation of huge "social" networks through, the internet mean that among other factors, brand is more important than ever before. Employment branding has existed for a long time, but in a world where there are brand interactions happening in real time in front of an audience (hello Twitter) and literally millions of people can share opinions and experiences about an organization (hello Facebook) the importance of positive brand interaction with audiences has just exploded.

The increasing importance of employer branding, arguably even greater for niche sourcing like diversity, is why I am pleased that we have started working closely with Tamm Communications, an innovative leader in the field, to develop truly comprehensive offerings around diversity employment. We'll be talking more about this at the HRPA conference next week.

So that's all very good but I hear you saying "I need to find more/better candidates!" and "How do I leverage the Twitter/LinkedIn candidate cloud with my organizational employment culture!". Well maybe you don't entirely say the last one (hopefully nobody does really) but often times people come really close. Yes, you should be on Twitter, and yes your employment culture is important but it's not the place to start. I am huge fan of innovation and being on the cutting edge of whatever technology, ideas or systems there are. My interest in innovation is for example the reason why TalentOyster sends alerts about new jobs via SMS text alerts to candidates. Innovation is cool, but for many organizations it's a few steps ahead of where they need to be.

For many years, in high school and university, I played (and later coached) football. Football can be a complicated game, especially at the professional level you will see many intricacies in strategy and plays, but more than anything football is a team game.

I learned early and often that you can have the greatest play on paper but if your quarterback has bad footwork, if your linemen don't block, if your receivers don't run precise routes or if your back doesn't hold on to the ball none of it will matter. These are all fundamental parts of success for the various positions on a football team and if you don't have them you just cannot win.

I have been in the job board and recruiting industries for long enough to see that even though we all want to be cool and progressive sometimes there needs to be more of a focus on fundamentals here too.

So what are some of the fundamentals I am referring to exactly? Well for job posts they include things like:

• Have good job titles on your job posts. If every job was really the world's most exciting then coming up with alluring job post titles would be easy but of course life is not so easy. But you can at least make sure that your job titles are meaningful. Too often I will see job post titles like "Lvl 3 Clerk" or "Ast Mgr RG 2". What do those even mean?!? The basic question you should ask yourself if composing a job title is this, will anyone outside of our organization know what this means? If the honest answer is no then it's time to re-write it. People aren't going to even look at your opportunity if they can't decipher its title.


• Include as much detail as possible in your post. Saying your job is in "Toronto" or "Vancouver" doesn't really tell a potential candidate much. Imagine a candidate looking for a job that is accessible by public transit, what can you say about the location of the job for that candidate?


• Detail is good, too much boilerplate is bad. Often in a well intentioned but poorly executed effort to extol the benefits of working for an organization a company will include several paragraphs describing the company and why a candidate would want to work there. Now don't get me wrong, as I said the intention is good but there is a line between doing this well and appearing to be insincere as well as losing candidate interest. If you have an opening paragraph about your organization, and maybe even close with another one or two that's fine, but if every job in your organization from senior to junior starts with the same 5 paragraphs of "We're the best company EVER!" it has lost all meaning and impact. In fact our testing shows that when presented with these types of ads candidates are less likely to read the entire description and far less likely to apply for the position.

So having said all that I will say that there isn't one magic answer for how anyone's job posts should be structured. Varieties based on industry, type of job and just what works for your organization are certainly going to exist. My point today is that sometimes we can all get caught up in the "hype" of the latest recruiting or sourcing trend and we forget that this too is a "team" game. If you're looking for more and better candidates to hire before you ramp up the social networking and technical widget brigade maybe just take a moment to make sure that you have put enough focus on your fundamentals first.