Chances are you already have a diversity plan laid out for your company. But as time progresses, you need to constantly revamp it to adjust it with the ongoing diversity needs. Earlier, in the name of diversity, companies only focused on hiring women. However, with changing times, diversity horizons have expanded. You need to stretch your limits and up your current diversity plans to meet those horizons.

Read on to know what all you should do to take your diversity hiring to the next level.

1. Conduct a Diversity Hiring Audit
2. Re-word Your Job Posting
3. Offer Internships to Diverse Groups
4. Start Blind Hiring
5. Celebrate Multicultural Festivals
6. Strengthen Anti-discriminatory Policy

1.  Conduct a Diversity Hiring Audit

Diversity audit is the first step to improving your diversity hiring practices.

It provides a birds-eye view of your organization in terms of ongoing diversity practices, skewed gender ratio, inconsistent numbers, gender pay gaps, diversity bottlenecks, and more.

Best part about audits is that it is not restricted to identifying problems. You can drill deep into the data to unleash the possible problems and brainstorm solutions & strategies to improve organization-wide diversity makeup.

Since auditing is a critical process, here are a few things that you should keep in mind while performing the audits.

• Cover all the employees of your organization
• Define the purpose
• Create a team with all level of members
• Design quality audit questionnaire
• Devise a communication plan before launching the survey

Pro Tip: Hire a Chief Diversity Officer

2.  Re-word Your Job Posting

For years, Job Descriptions(JD) have gone unnoticed. Unconscious bias has festered the JDs, resulting in biased language and skewed perceptions. As a testament, 55% of job descriptions in 2016 were found to have a masculine tone.

This is why it’s important to give special importance to job descriptions. If not taken seriously, these biases can do irreversible damage to your organizational diversity.

Biases can span across gender, social, cultural, geographical, racial, and other areas. Therefore you should be extra cautious while framing JDs.

For instance, macho overtones, such as ‘killer instinct’, ‘work hard’, ‘play hard’, ‘fearless’, and more have been statistically proven to attract more men than women.

Nitpick your Job Description(JD) language. Swap out ‘man’ words such as chairman, fireman, mankind, and manpower. Keep the tone neutral by using words ‘they’, ‘he/she’, ‘person’ such as ‘Businessperson’ in place of ‘Businessmen’, ‘Personnel’ in place of ‘Manpower’.

3. Offer Internships to Diverse Groups

Today’s interns are your workforce for tomorrow.

If you are planning to make your future workplace more diverse, then its implementation starts from today.

Hire diverse interns today. Eventually, when you will retain them they will make up for your tomorrow’s workplace diversity. For this, target a list of schools, colleges, and universities that can help you reach a diverse candidate base. Reach out to organizations that work with minority people and offer them internships at your organization. Partner with clubs, NGOs, and sororities that are historically diverse and underrepresented.

You can also devise mentorship programs for young candidates. These mentors can communicate and encourage students to tread on new paths. Role models are the biggest motivators when it comes to students. Looking up to someone who belongs to the same race, gender, community, infuses vision at a young age.

Pro Tip: Build a Dedicated Diversity Hiring Programs for College Recruits

4.  Start Blind Hiring

Blind Hiring is an innovative approach to hiring that is aimed at eliminating bias during recruitment. It hides candidates’ personal information like name, gender, religion, or socio-economic background from the hiring manager. Plus, it also removes academic qualifications, experience, marks, and other judgemental criteria.

Looking beyond the typical candidate information, blind hiring is aimed at obscuring any identity cues that infuse biases in the process. Anonymizing the resume helps to eliminate racial, ethnicity, age, gender, and other biases.

You can start your blind hiring process by identifying the information that can be eliminated.  For starters, hide

1. Name Identification
2. Photo
3. Demographic Information
4. Academic Information

5.  Celebrate Multicultural Festivals

Merely talking about diversity doesn’t work. You need to show that you genuinely care. And this can be achieved by acknowledging and appreciating diversity in a multitude of ways. One being celebrating multiculturalism through festivals.

Celebration of diverse individuals brings people together as a community and brings awareness about different cultures and groups. Moreover, it’s an opportunity to acknowledge employees and their culture on a public platform. Publicizing your diversity efforts on social media platforms builds trust in the potential candidates and attract them to your organization.

Here are five ways you can use to celebrate multiculturalism in your organization.

1. Build a Multicultural Event Calendar
2. Conduct Multicultural Training
3. Invest in Diversity Education
4. Create a Multicultural Bulletin Board
5. Provide Multicultural Holidays

6. Strengthen Anti-Discriminatory Policies

All your diversity initiatives may go in vain if employees continue to discriminate against their peers and plague the organization’s diversity.

For this very reason, anti-discrimination policies are imperative. Not only it strengthens all your diversity initiatives but also adds a level of fear among employees who dare to discriminate in the workplace.

Discrimination claims can be damaging to your reputation, therefore be careful while drafting your policies. Ensure no offensive act slips by. Draw clear lines between acceptable and punishable behaviors. And be crystal clear with your punishments.

In general, your discrimination policy must at a minimum cover the below acts,

Differences should not be a barrier to equality of opportunity. It is unlawful to harass, victimize or treat someone less favorably than another person because of certain characteristics that are protected: age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation.

Also, be clear with the process of reporting discrimination. How and where should your employees complain and what will be the course of action after reporting the complaint. Ensure to have a dedicated contact person for the same, so that employees do not have to toggle between departments for reporting such critical and sensitive issues.