We caught up with Craig Hall, the Operations Director at Glass Digital, here he is responsible for maintaining a positive and inclusive company culture in every aspect of the business. Read on as he discusses his top suggestions for making your hiring process more inclusive.

Diversity is essential to the success of a business. Companies with a diverse executive board tend to receive significantly higher earnings and returns on equity compared to those who are less diverse (McKinsey & Company). So, it’s important that you adopt an inclusive recruitment process to ensure you’re reaching the widest possible audience. But where do you start?

You need to make your company feel like a place the candidate wants to work in. If your workplace doesn’t appear to embrace inclusivity and diversity, applicants might feel unwelcome and could be put off applying for your roles, and you could end up missing out on the perfect candidate. So, you need to make sure your recruitment process shows off your openness to diversity.

Below, I’ll be going through just four ways you can alter your hiring process to welcome a more diverse group of applicants.

Review your job descriptions

Job descriptions are one of the most important aspects of your recruitment process, but they’re often the most common place for unconscious gender bias. The language you use in your job adverts can have a huge influence on the gender of candidates that apply (Textio). For example, words such as ‘exhaustive’, ‘enforcement’, and ‘fearless’ all have strong masculine connotations, and you can end up having a much higher proportion of men applying for your roles. And, that means that you could be missing out on valuable skills sets because of a simple word choice.

Research has also shown that men will apply for a job if they meet only 60% of the criteria, whereas women will only apply if they meet 100% of the requirements. However, this isn’t down to a fear of not being able to do the job well, but a reluctance to waste time applying if they were unlikely to be hired.

To improve your diversity, take a look at your current job adverts and highlight and remove any wording that might be putting people off your roles. It can really help to focus on only the most essential skills and the basics of the role in your initial job ad, as this is less likely to put women off applying and you can make sure you’re getting candidates that fit the role.

Involve a team in the process

It’s only natural for people to prefer someone they can relate to. Hiring managers are more likely to view candidates who are culturally similar to them as a better fit for the role, according to research published in the American Sociological Review. But this could hinder your recruitment process, and you could end up hiring the wrong person for the job just because you have things in common. So, try to include a team of people at each level of the decision-making process. This way, you’re going to get a wider set of opinions on each candidate, so you can be sure that you’re hiring the right person for the job.

Develop your company culture…

Candidates need to know that you’re taking steps to be more inclusive, so you might need to review your current company culture to make sure it’s a welcoming one. For example, at Glass Digital, we try to adopt an inclusive policy by embracing the culture, nationality, gender, and lifestyle of all our employees. Staff perks, activities, and the day-to-day life of the company needs to work around everyone. We know that staff need time to take care of their children or focus on family commitments, too. That’s why we’ve adopted flexible and remote working policies that have helped everyone achieve a much healthier work/life balance.

We’re also keen on implementing extra perks to reward our staff for their hard work. It’s important to us that we plan activities that everyone can access and enjoy, so we plan regular employee engagement meetings to discuss ideas that everyone will love. We’ve also recently rolled out an employee engagement survey so we can ask all members of staff about what kinds of activities they’d like to do. This way, we know we’re including everyone in the decision, and we can find out what’s working and what isn’t.

…and show it off

Once you’ve got an inclusive company culture, you need to show it off wherever you can, as candidates are going to be researching your company as they apply for a role or prepare for an interview.

You’ve worked hard to develop a happy and healthy workplace, so make sure you’re sharing it on your website and social media. In your job descriptions, you can always highlight your company’s dedication to inclusivity, so applicants know that they’ll be considered equally to everyone else.

At Glass Digital, we like to share our perks on all our social media accounts whenever we can. We’ve also added information about our flexitime and remote working policies to our website and all our job adverts, and it’s helped us attract a wide variety of people to our roles.

By celebrating diversity, you can help to attract a much wider variety of talent. Just follow these four tips to develop a more inclusive hiring process and your business will thrive.