How to Create a Diversity Sourcing Strategy

Jonathan Kidder

4 years ago

If you are striving to hire a more diversified staff, you’re probably thinking about how you can update your recruiting strategies to help better attract diverse applicants. The fact is, in order to reach a fair amount of underrepresented minority candidates, you need to recruit in a purposeful and focused manner. You just can’t wait for qualified and BLNA leads to apply for your roles. You’ll need to have your Sourcing team focus on building a strategy. Below is how to build a diversity sourcing strategy at your company.

Tips for Diverse Recruiting

These tips aren’t perfect, but with some trial-and-error, you’ll be able to implement them into your practices and get better results.

Launch Objectives and Milestones: As once said, “A dream without a plan is just a wish,” and what’s a plan without goals? You should start by determining the milestones you need to hit to consider your changes successful overtime. Track all your metrics and create a sourcing goal for each week, month, and quarter.

Get Creative With Platforms: Out with the old, in with the new. While some traditional methods still work great, others are quickly becoming dated and they’re leaving out a lot of diverse talent.

Experiment With Engagement: Those outreach templates you’ve been using might just need to be revamped to reflect more welcoming, universal language and to make them more appealing to the modern worker in general. Ask for Referrals – use your diverse employees and have them better represent your employment brand. Get them involved in your outreach efforts. I wrote a post about creating a Talent Sourcing Jam (here).

Bonus: I have a massive list of Diversity Boolean string samples (here) ⇐

Platforms to Use:

One of the best ways to reach a diverse pool of candidates is to try a diverse list of platforms. Here’s a mix of both traditional and non-traditional recruiting platforms that you should consider using.

Traditional

Medium: This is a fantastic source for finding long-form content that leads are posting and interacting with. Learn about the by seeing what they recommend, highlight, and follow. One way to start recruiting through Medium is to find people who are interested in a particular topic, like “Data Science.”

Twitter: The limit of 140 characters might make you doubt the depth of a tweet, but it can actually reveal a lot about an individual. Dig into people they follow and what they tweet and re-tweet and you may learn what delights, annoys, or inspires them. I wrote a post about diversity sourcing on Twitter (here).

Quora: With the outrageously diverse user base of Quora, sifting through the questions and answers is a great way to find top talent and get a feel for how they share their knowledge. Find a topic relevant to an open role and look for the people who gave great answers. I wrote a post about sourcing on Quora (here).

Non-Traditional

Jopwell: This site is dedicated to black and Hispanic job seekers, making it ideal for helping fill in the gaps of your talent pool when it comes to these underrepresented populations of candidates.

Include.io: This platform will help you connect to LGBT women who are looking for jobs in the tech space. All profiles have already been peer-reviewed by other candidates, helping to qualify skills.

Diversify Tech: A collection of resources for underrepresented people in tech. Once a week, the site sends out a newsletter that highlights available tech candidates.

Creating a Sourcing Power Hour:

Number One >> Have your team dedicate 1-3 hours a week to source diverse leads. Create a live excel document to track all your teams recruiting efforts. Here’s how we track our current leads in process:

RPS

Assessment

BPS1

BPS2

#Female Onsite

#URM Onsite

# Total On-Sites

# Offers Extended

# Offers Accepted

Any challenges?

More Tips:

Try cold calling candidates after work hours. Diverse candidates sometimes have different work schedules.

Candidates don’t update keywords / searchable terms on social sites. This makes it a challenge to find and source diverse leads. I recommend exploring alternative networks like Facebook or Instagram to search for additional leads.

Consider rewriting your job descriptions. I recommend using JobLint to better assess company summaries and job descriptions.

Have the Hiring manager and his team do a sourcing jam event. They can source from there own personal networks to find diverse leads. I wrote how to have sourcing jam (here).

Employment Branding: Writing about what a company is doing will, in itself, help attract a more diverse workforce. Sharing posts about trial and error, experimentation, and success stories. Don’t stay silent during this time – conduct Q&A interviews and get your diverse leadership talking!

Find More Diverse Talent

Get started with this advice today and begin recruiting a more diverse workforce to your open positions. While it takes time and dedication to seek out leads in the underrepresented segments of the population, it’s an endeavor that will prove well worth it. Start by tracking your recruiting metrics!

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