DEI has been very topical over the last few years and organisations have rushed to get their DEI policies and procedures in place to help demonstrate their commitment. Having a policy is just a policy unless it comes with clear cut definitions and measurement criteria accompanied by achievable action plans for all talent irrespective of seniority. Many larger organisations see DEI as a key element of their Corporate Social Responsibility objectives as it demonstrates to all stakeholders that they have publicly committed to running a company that embraces DEI. Organisations recognise that DEI initiatives can help retain both clients and employees who are key stakeholders along with investors for example.
These great initiatives can be incredibly difficult to implement in reality because of the presence of the “one-size-fits-all” legacy from human resources and talent management where diversity, equity and inclusion is the opposite approach to this. The transformation to adopt DEI policies cannot take place overnight and are more likely to evolve over time and need total commitment from the organisation’s leaders.
Understanding Current DEI Status.
Management and leaders need to task human resources with establishing their organisation’s current DEI status through the examination of employee data to discover any anomalies and fully understand existing disparities. Quantitative data is only one aspect of the discovery process and human resources should conduct qualitative research too so that talent perceptions and individual experiences are included in any analysis. The results will identify elements that need further work along with those that are working well.
Identify Opportunities for Improvement and Build Robust Plans
The research conducted should be scheduled for regular intervals to enable the creation of benchmarks for future comparison. From the research leaders should carefully choose their DEI priorities and task human resources and senior managers to actively address these. Any DEI shortfalls identified should be crafted into an achievable action plan that details exactly what needs to take place along with who will be responsible for these actions.
Making DEI Actions count
Ensuring that a DEI policy is more than just a statement organisations must regularly evaluate their progress against published plans and make adjustments as needed. Consider giving talent managers and human resources the freedom to experiment and explore ways of improving their DEI so they can move away from any old and outdated standards of the past. Ensure that the current DEI status and improvements made are transparent to all stakeholders to demonstrate that progress is being made.
The implementation of effective DEI strategies in large corporate organisations that have been around for some time can take considerable time to achieve. For small nimble tech start-ups, the ability to demonstrate rapid progress on their DEI policies should be easier. However, maintaining any momentum can be challenging when most tech start-ups are guilty of having particularly poor DEI combined with a ‘growth at any cost’ attitude making sustainable DEI improvements difficult. For any tech start-up looking to recruit new digital talent and fulfil their DEI obligations using a recruitment solution that eliminates bias in the recruitment and selection process can help overcome some issues.
One such company who are game changing the face of recruitment by providing a robust process to deliver more efficient recruitment without bias is Hire Digital. A start-up recruitment company with a global presence that has invested heavily in Artificial Intelligence (AI) to manage the digital tech recruitment and talent management process. Their ATS software platforms give digital talent recruiters a strict criterion for posting job adverts and descriptions and their AI works in such a way that it generates a much smaller more targeted candidate list by using up to 40,000 attributes. They key to this is efficiency, recruiters spend less time generating job advertisements and trawling through hundreds of CV’s to get their shortlist, Hire Digital tech can rapidly access up to 1bn talent globally.
Hire Digital is an AI technology with a human touch that is completely revolutionising the recruitment and selection process. It’s two times faster, 50 % cheaper and ten times more accurate than traditional hiring tech. To find out more speak to Robin Brohl at Hire Digital he is a real person and would love to engage with you and help you streamline your recruitment processes.