Episode 142 - Diversity is Good for Recruitment

Summary

Diversity isn’t just great for teams and organisations - it can also help with recruitment.

Transcript

Welcome to episode 142 of the Leadership Today podcast where each week we bring research to life in your leadership. This week we look at how diversity can help with recruiting.

We know that diversity in organisations produces lots of benefits when it is well managed. A well-managed diverse team will out perform a more uniform team every time. 

But actively promoting the diversity of an organisation also appears to help its attractiveness to job seekers. Recent research has found that disclosing key diversity scores in job advertisements increased the click-through rate of jobseekers, particularly for those organisations with higher diversity scores. Applicants were even willing to look at lower paying jobs where the employer had better diversity scores. Follow up research found this approach was particularly effective for women and people of colour who were more likely to see a diversity score as useful in deciding which jobs to apply for.

So let’s assume that you’ve made the effort to improve the diversity of employees within your organisation. Here are some ideas of what you might do next based on these findings:

  1. Think about diversity diversely - I always encourage clients to look beyond the more obvious diversity dimensions to also explore differing personalities, thinking styles and other factors.

  2. Promote the diversity in your teams - if you have actively built diversity in your team or organisation, celebrate that and promote it to others inside and outside your organisation.

  3. Diversity helps build even greater diversity - this research suggests that building and promoting diversity in your organisation will help attract more diverse candidates.

Diversity isn’t just a nice-to-have - it leads to real benefits for organisations, even extending to our ability to attract stronger candidates.

Reference

Choi, Jung Ho and Pacelli, Joseph and Rennekamp, Kristina M. and Tomar, Sorabh, Do Jobseekers Value Diversity Information? A Mixed Methods Investigation (April 25, 2022). SMU Cox School of Business Research Paper No. 22-04, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4025383 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4025383