4 Tips for Recruiting Diverse Candidates From a Small-Business Owner

Striving to achieve better workplace diversity? Take a few hints from a small business finding success with its diversity recruiting strategy.

Entrepreneur Sofya Polyakov’s background makes her a passionate advocate for diversity in the workplace. As a woman in the tech industry in 2010, she was well aware of what it felt like to be in the minority. At the time, only 6% of the chief executives of the top 100 tech companies were women.
 

She and her partner, Edward Boatman, prioritized diversity recruiting efforts from the early days of Noun Project, the platform they co-founded where users can download icons and photos from a network of designers. Noun Project’s 24-person team is 43% women (50% at the leadership level), 33% BIPOC, and represents working parents, immigrants, veterans, members of the LGBTQIA+ community, and individuals with disabilities.

Polyakov’s priorities are becoming more important for businesses across the country, too. In fact, in a recent Capterra survey, 46% of HR leaders reported feeling more pressure than usual from their workforce to become more diverse and inclusive.

But small-business leaders with limited resources may not know where to start improving their hiring practices.

Below, we pair Polyakov’s four actionable tips from Noun Project with how you can apply them to your own small business.

1. Write inclusive job descriptions that attract diverse candidates

The words you use in a job description are the first impression a job seeker gets of your company. Using gendered terms, including degree or tenure requirements, or slipping in ableist phrases can cause qualified candidates to write off the position (and your business) altogether.

Polyakov and her team found that the degrees people held were completely irrelevant to how they perform on the job, so they don’t even consider them during the screening process. Instead, they consider how much experience a candidate has.

Here are some guidelines for writing inclusive job descriptions:

• List skill needs instead of degree requirements
• Use age- and gender-neutral words
• Avoid culturally exclusive language (such as a clean-shaven requirement)
• Don’t use ableist phrases (such as “must be able to stand for long periods of time”)
• State your commitment to creating a diverse and inclusive work environment

2. Expand your candidate pool to increase your chances of diverse applicants

Using the same websites over and over to find potential candidates will lead to hiring the same types of people. Think of your candidate pool as the top of your recruiting funnel; in order to increase your odds of a diverse hire, focus on widening that funnel.

Polyakov says that one of the things that worked well for Noun Project has been moving away from posting open positions on the usual, popular sites. Instead, they use Workable, a tool that helps them share their openings on over 200 websites.

3. Create a diverse hiring team who bring distinct viewpoints to the decision-making process

Polyakov believes that including a mix of individuals on your hiring team is beneficial for two reasons. It builds buy-in from your current team, and it allows you to get multiple points of view (hopefully provided by a diverse recruiting team), so you’re less likely to miss something due to personal bias.
 

We recommend assembling a hiring team made up of a diverse group of individuals in terms of age, gender, background, seniority, and position within your company. A varied hiring team is less likely to make decisions based on bias than a single person or a group of like-minded individuals. If you don’t have the representation at your organization that makes this an easy task, Polyakov recommends bringing in someone from outside of your company to help make hiring decisions.

At the very least, you should aim to have every shortlisted application reviewed by at least two people, and every candidate should be interviewed at least two times by different team members.

4. Standardize your interview process so unconscious bias doesn’t interfere with hiring decisions

If you ask different candidates different questions, there will be no common ground to compare one interview to another. To make it easier on yourself and your hiring team, you should standardize your interview process.

Here are our tips for achieving consistency in your interview process:

• Prepare a standard set of questions to ask during each interview
• Ask the questions in the same order every time
• Create a scale to score candidates’ responses
• When reviewing, compare each candidate’s responses for the first question before moving on to the next (and so on)

These tips will help take the ambiguity out of your decision-making process. Ideally, your hiring team will use the scores to clearly determine which candidates should move forward.

Polyakov’s team takes it a step further by submitting their hiring recommendations individually. Each member of her hiring team emails the hiring manager their recommendation of hire/not hire, along with examples from the interview to support their decision. To avoid influencing others’ opinions, no one on the hiring team is allowed to discuss any candidate until all have been interviewed and all recommendations sent.

What to do next: Focus on small changes within reach

Rather than scrapping your current recruiting process and starting over, look for opportunities to even the playing field for job seekers.

Implementing the diversity recruiting strategies in this article is a good place to start, but there’s always more to learn. We’ve got more resources to help you break out of your homogenous bubble:

• What’s the Difference Between Diversity and Inclusion?
• 3 Ways HR Tech Can Improve Diversity & Inclusion in the Workplace
• Recruiters Beware: AI Can Discriminate Too

Interested in taking the software approach to improve your diversity recruiting efforts? In a Capterra survey from last August, 89% of HR leaders expressed that they either already have implemented or plan to implement D&I software tools. Don’t let your business fall behind.

We’ve covered a variety of software options in this article that can help you achieve your diversity recruiting goals. For a full list of what’s out there, browse our HR software directory.

Capterra COVID-19 HR Impact Survey 2020 Methodology

The Capterra COVID-19 HR Impact Survey was conducted in August 2020. We surveyed 123 HR “leaders,” defined as CHROs, HR vice presidents, HR directors, HR managers, or any other role with HR leadership responsibilities at U.S.-based businesses. We worded the questions to ensure that each respondent fully understood the meaning and the topic at hand.

Note: The specific applications referenced in this article are examples to show software features in context and are not intended as endorsements or recommendations. They have been obtained from sources believed to be reliable at the time of publication.