Diversity and inclusion are key to creating an engaging work environment that promotes innovation and growth. It’s also been proven that companies that promote inclusive hiring are more profitable. Diversity recruiting isn’t just the right thing, it’s the smart thing. 

Creating a truly inclusive recruitment process is important, but it isn’t easy. Recruiters face many challenges, including natural human bias, when implementing a diversity recruitment strategy. This bias is especially present in the screening and sourcing phases. 

As a result, recruiters are turning to solutions, like AI-powered talent  acquisition to reduce bias throughout their process, leveraging AI-enabled candidate sourcing and screening to support diversity and inclusion right from the start. 

Diversity vs Inclusion 

While diversity and inclusion are similar concepts, they aren’t the same. A company can be diverse but not be inclusive, and vice versa. 

Diversity refers to hiring individuals with different visible traits including gender, race, or age, and with invisible traits including unique skills, backgrounds, and experiences. 

Inclusivity is treating people equally despite those differences, including making sure they all have the same level of access to opportunities and tools, and all of their voices are heard.

The Importance of Building and Maintaining a Diverse Workforce

Inclusive hiring has a variety of benefits that have a big impact on your bottom line. 

1. Attract More Applicants. If candidates researching your company see a variety of people represented, they may feel more comfortable applying. Women, for example, might be uncomfortable applying to a company that appears to be male-dominated. 
2. Reduce Turnover. A diverse and inclusive workplace is one where employees feel heard, seen, valued, and accepted. This creates a happier, more engaged workforce who are more likely to stay with you long term, which reduces your recruitment and hiring costs.
3. Boost Productivity. A happy employee is a productive employee. The morale boost brought on by a more diverse workplace motivates employees to be more solutions-oriented, to work together, and ultimately be more productive.
4. Boost Innovation and Creativity. Similar people tend to share similar thought patterns and ideas; however, a diverse workforce is more likely to have varying thought patterns and ideas. This results in more innovative and creative brainstorming sessions, solutions, and strategies.
   Employees feel more comfortable sharing their ideas in an inclusive environment.
5. Increase Revenue. Various studies show that companies with higher diversity scores see a positive impact on their bottom line. 

The benefits of diversity and inclusion listed above directly translate to better employee output and reduced costs related to hiring and recruitment, all of which directly impact revenue. 

How AI Enhances Diversity Recruiting and Supports Inclusive Hiring

AI enhances diversity recruiting and inclusive hiring in many ways. The biggest impact being the ability to reduce the elements of conscious and unconscious bias in the recruitment process. Traditional candidate sourcing and screening are often sources of implicit bias. 

AI enhances screening and sourcing, ensuring all candidates are being considered fairly and equally, based solely on what’s required for the role. 

AI-Enabled Candidate Sourcing 

AI enabled you to source a more diverse talent and build a more inclusive pipeline. With AI-enabled candidate sourcing, you can ensure all qualified candidates have equal access to open roles by ignoring demographic information. 

Conversely, AI solutions can zero in on key demographics like race, age, or gender to help you source candidates from specific groups in order to fulfill your specific diversity goals. 

AI also helps you create more inclusive job descriptions by identifying wording or terms that may be seen as biased or discriminatory, to help attract a more diverse talent pool. 

AI-Enabled Candidate Screening 

AI helps ensure that unconscious bias is not present in the screening process. Certain information on a candidate resume may trigger bias in a human recruiter, causing them to make assumptions and overlook a candidate based on a name, school, dates, or locations.

With AI-enabled candidate screening, you can ensure that this type of data is not considered. This allows for a more objective screening process. 

AI-enabled candidate screening also allows you to avoid positive bias. This ensures that a recruiter does not favor a candidate who they feel is similar to themselves or who they better connect with socially. This type of bias leads recruiters to falsely assume a candidate is a good fit for the role.

AI will also enable you to track your progress in relation to diversity goals. By gaining access to large-scale data sets and reporting, you can determine whether your hiring process is diversity-friendly and expose any barriers to employment.

Leverage AI-Powered Talent Intelligence for Diversity and Inclusion

AI-powered talent intelligence has multiple solutions you can leverage to promote diversity and inclusion. With AI-Enabled Talent Acquisition and AI-Enabled Recruitment, your recruiters will have access to tools that allow them to achieve D&I through:: 

• Offering bias-free screening, ignoring things like race, gender, age, etc., and only focusing on the requirements for the role 
• Building a diverse talent pool 
• Increasing diversity by considering additional factors like business or life experience
• Flagging discrepancies in the hiring process and providing information on who enters the pool vs. who is hired
• Providing access to analytics to flag any signs of potential bias across all processes and exposing areas that need improvement

Investing in AI to support D&I in recruitment ensures you won’t miss out on top candidates due to bias. It will also free up your recruiters, HR, and leadership team to focus on inclusion so you can start reaping the benefits of a diverse workforce. 

To learn more about how AI can help you create a diverse workforce that will take your business to new levels of innovation, creativity, and retention, request a demo with OORWIN today.