Create Awareness:
Shine some light on the current state of your company culture. Get honest about the petty things that have become deal breakers in your hiring process. Most organizations that lack diversity look at their key talent, and try to simply find more of those types of people. Engineer and author Carlos Bueno explains the trouble with cookie cutter hiring as it always seems to happen:
“We’ve created a make-believe cult of objective meritocracy, a pseudo-scientific mythos to obscure and reinforce the belief that only people who look and talk like us are worth noticing. After making such a show of burning down the bad old rules of business, the new ones we’ve created seem pretty similar.”
Build Diversity into the Culture:
85% of corporations in a survey reported that diversity is crucial to fostering innovation in the workplace. While creating a tolerant culture is important, it is vital to establish and communicate the proven benefits of a diverse workforce. To merely tolerate diversity is not enough, it must be projected and accepted as a strategic advantage in business.
This is all done optimally through employee assessment tools that can help take the subjectivity out of hiring practices and team building processes. When a leader can hire or assemble a team based on objective information about their employees or candidates, it is much easier to build a diverse culture, and break the mold.
Dedicating resources to becoming more diverse simply makes good business sense. A diverse workforce is known to increase innovation and have positive effects on consumer reach. Investing in effective team building tools and practices will prevent you from becoming a “Members Only” organization.
Want to learn how to hire the best person for the job, not just anther clone?