Creating a diverse workplace is an essential part of developing a company culture that is innovative and inclusive. To successfully build a diverse group of employees, you have to start with your hiring process. There is no way to create an inclusive organization without first making sure that you are recruiting talent with diverse experiences and backgrounds. Here are some practices that you can implement to ensure your hiring process is fair and considers all kinds of people for each position.

Educate Your Hiring Team

It’s important to educate every member of your company on being welcoming and friendly towards many different people, but one of the most vital teams to instruct is your hiring department. Many people carry unconscious biases towards those who share similarities with them, including cultural identity. Educating them about those biases and how they can compensate for them will improve the way they select candidates and help them choose more diverse people from hiring pools.

Select Diverse People for Your Hiring Team

Since people carry bias, one of the best things you can do to combat exclusion in hiring is to create a diverse group of people to help you select candidates. If everyone is different, they can point out any problems in the selection process, and you are more likely to get a hiring pool full of different options. 

Expand Your Search

If you frequently recruit employees from the same sources, it might be causing your company to inadvertently hire the same kind of people repeatedly. This can be mitigated by searching out different sources of candidates; you can expand the number of job fairs you attend or change the campuses you look at for hiring. Also, consider putting your jobs on as many online sites as possible. It may also be advisable to make your criteria less strict where you can; if, for example, you are looking for 6 or 7 years of experience, consider widening the range from 4-7. This will open up your job to more candidates who may be highly talented but not quite meet your initial requirements.

Combining these practices with techniques your hiring department may already be using to make sure the process is fair (like sorting software) allows you to compensate for the biases and create a strong and diverse team that will help your business excel.