What’s the beauty behind diversity? It is often stated that diversity brings great benefits to an organization by leveraging different perspectives to make better decisions. Recent studies suggest that there might be a correlation between inclusive marketing teams and real performance benefits when compared with businesses that do not value a diverse workplace.
For example, McKinsey & Company researched how ethnic diversity correlates with profitability. The conclusion of their study is “Inclusion & Diversity management improves employee satisfaction and also reduces conflict between groups, improving collaboration and loyalty. This can create an environment that is more attractive to high performers.” Higher performance among a workforce, more often than not, leads to a higher company profit.
So how does a business create a strong, diverse, and inclusive marketing team? Unfortunately, hiring diverse employees simply isn’t enough for your employees to feel respected and perform at their best. Managing your employees with inclusion is necessary to get results. A leader should understand each employee adds specific value to the company and that all employees need one common goal and shared values.
How to Increase Diversity on Your Team?
To ensure that you’re hiring a diverse range of people is to ensure that there is diversity in who is applying to your open positions. Here are a few suggestions that can help you diversify your candidate pool.
Set Diverse Hiring Goals
Set a specific hiring goal that your team can follow when selecting new talent. Employees and leadership can keep this topic in mind while incorporating new strategies into their sourcing and interview process.
Ask Diverse Employees for Referrals
A great place to hire more diverse employees is to utilize your current employees. Encourage employees to share your job ads within their networks, and/or social media. Your employees will feel that their opinion is valued by the organization and vice versa for candidates.
Diversify Your Job Descriptions
Find creative ways to be more inclusive with your tone/language within your job descriptions to appeal to candidates from a variety of backgrounds. Focus on using gender neutral verbiage as well as avoid jargon as much as possible. Here is more info on how to write a diverse & inclusive job description.
Bonus: Celarity has an extensive library of free job description templates for roles in the marketing, creative, and digital industries.
Post Job Opportunities on Diverse Job Boards & Groups
Find diverse job boards where you can post your job postings on. Utilize these job boards to help diversify your candidates who are applying to open positions. Update postings regularly on these sites & incorporate them into your hiring goals.
“Block Out Technique”
“Block out” all personal information on resumes. Personal information can include: date of birth, location, education, and/or the candidates name. Blocking out personal information, a hiring manager and/or recruiter can reduce bias and focus on the candidates experiences/skills relevant to the open position.
Publish Your Company’s Diversity & Inclusion Content Often
Take advantage of social media channels by publishing relevant Diversity & Inclusion content. It is important to look out for biased language both when developing content for websites and when writing email campaigns. Another great way to reach a diverse audience within social media channels and/or advertising is promoting diversity focused events.
How to Follow Through With Inclusion?
People hired from diverse backgrounds must feel that their perspectives are valued by their team members. As a manager, it’s important to ensure that you are providing an inclusive environment where your employees feel they are accepted by their differences. Employees who feel respected & valued will ultimately perform at their best so that they can focus on the overall business mission.
Examples of how a leader/manager can be more inclusive:
- Embrace collaboration among coworkers
- Encourage open dialogue among your employees
- Be transparent & have clear communication methods
- Value feedback from your current & future employees
- Create healthy conversations with opposing views but keep the team focused on shared goals and values
Inclusive marketing leaders are often open minded individuals and enjoy boosting their employees creativity – no idea is a bad idea mentally. They welcome ideas from all of their employees. These leaders enjoy hearing recommendations from individuals who are multiple levels down from other employees at the organization. A great book to help leaders adopt a mindset of promoting ideas is Multipliers by Liz Wiseman.
