Best Diversity Recruiting Software

What is Diversity Recruiting Software?

Why Use Diversity Recruiting Software?

Who Uses Diversity Recruiting Software?

Kinds of Diversity Recruiting Software

Diversity recruiting software is a booming field that is just getting started. The following list includes a variety of diversity recruiting tools that may all be features of a single solution or may be additional features or add-ons to recruiting automation tools to help improve the recruiting process.

Eliminate unconscious bias — Some diversity recruiting software focuses on helping HR departments, recruiters, and hiring managers remove unconscious bias from the hiring process. Many solutions provide tools to redact personal identifiers from resumes such as name, gender, age, employment history, criminal background, university attended, and photo. Essentially, these tools hide information that is irrelevant to the job.

Blind pre-employment screening — Diversity hiring solutions may provide preemployment screening tools that focus on job-specific skills tests, performance audition challenges, or gamified recruiting tools to match candidates with the jobs they rate the highest for on performance outcomes. These solutions help companies make hiring decisions based on a candidate’s job skills and not whether they like them or think they will fit into the company culture.

Candidate evaluations — Some diversity hiring technology helps HR personnel and hiring managers create a streamlined and consistent candidate evaluation process. This helps reduce unconscious bias from the interviewing process by aligning interview questions and feedback forms to reduce biased interactions among interviewers and candidates.

Diverse candidate sourcing — This diversity hiring technology helps companies, HR departments, and hiring managers source candidates from underrepresented groups based on their skills as well as their ethnicity and gender.

Job description software — Some of these diversity recruiting solutions focus on helping companies and HR departments craft unbiased job descriptions. Research has shown that common words used in job descriptions often have either female or male associations and thus might be repelling or attracting candidates based on their gender. These solutions check job descriptions for pronouns, gender-charged words, and superlatives, verify the number of requirements necessary, and more.

Employee referral — Some diversity recruiting tools also provide employee referral solutions to help improve the talent pipeline by incentivizing employees from underrepresented minority groups to refer from their personal networks.

Job boards — Many job boards focus on providing a platform for candidates from underrepresented groups including African Americans, Latinos, LGBTQ+, women, formerly incarcerated persons, veterans, and more.

Diversity Recruiting Software Features

The features of diversity recruiting software are as diverse as the solutions themselves. As stated above, these include tools to help remove unconscious bias from the hiring process, diversify the talent pipeline, expand employee referrals, and employ broader job boards. The following are a list of features that might be found in diversity recruiting software.

Diversity sourcing — Identify top candidates from a variety of underrepresented diverse talent pools based on gender, race, ethnicity, and veteran status.

Unconscious bias — Identify, manage, and remove unconscious bias from candidate sourcing and interviewing processes.

Improve interview and review process — Manage the interviewing and reviewing processes to help HR personnel, hiring managers, and interviewers reduce unconscious bias, thereby creating a fair and balanced hiring process.

Data and analytics — Diversity initiatives need to be closely monitored for effectiveness. By collecting the essential data and analyzing it, diversity recruiting software provides companies and HR departments with transparency into diversity sourcing efforts.

Potential Issues with Diversity Recruiting Software

Improving diversity recruiting and hiring alone is not enough to diversify a company. If the inclusion and engagement of all workers throughout the entire company is not a priority, a workplace culture will inevitably remain unwelcoming, at best, to a diverse workforce.

Lack of support and buy-in — If diversity hiring initiatives are mandated by the C suite and put on the head of HR or a diversity and inclusion officer, the initiative will inevitably fail. There must be complete buy-in and support from the top down to truly improve DEI throughout the entire company and create an inclusive workplace in which all employees can thrive. When diversity is just about public-facing numbers or marketing ploys, no amount of diversity software or consulting will have a lasting impact on diversity in the workplace.

Blinded by elite universities and brand-name companies — Recruiting efforts, for tech in particular, have traditionally been focused on elite schools and top tech companies. To expand and improve diversity recruiting initiatives, HR personnel and recruiters need to seek out talent pools beyond the top colleges and companies. There is an abundance of talent from non-elite schools and nondegree programs like coding bootcamps that must be tapped to diversify the talent pool. Even having a bachelor’s degree as an essential qualification is detrimental to the talent pool and diversity initiatives.

Overworked HR personnel and recruiters — Recruiters and HR personnel tasked with hiring essentially function like salespeople. These personnel are tasked with filling a specific number of roles as soon as possible to earn commissions and meet goals, thus they go with what works and what they know. Unless CEOs empower the HR department to build a recruitment process with diversity as the main goal, recruiters may not be incentivized to take risks by trying newer methods of building their talent pool.

Lack of clear ROI — Without a clear ROI, it can be difficult to build or expand diversity hiring initiatives. What HR directors, diversity and inclusion officers, HR personnel, and recruiters don’t know will hinder their efforts. They need to understand how their diversity hiring efforts translate into improving diversity throughout the company. They need the data, they need to understand it, and they need to use it.

Software and Services Related to Diversity Recruiting Software

Diversity & inclusion consulting providers — Diversity & inclusion consulting providers help companies foster workplace diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). These diversity experts help businesses create, foster, and manage diversity hiring initiatives from inclusion in the mission statement through understanding ROI.

Job description management software — Job description management software helps organizations construct, manage, and store job description information. These solutions often help organizations reduce any bias from their job descriptions that might prohibit qualified candidates from applying for the job.

Job boards software — Job boards software connects employers to candidates by providing easy-to-use databases in which to post job openings. More and more job boards are focusing on niche candidates and cater toward underrepresented groups. HR personnel and recruiters can use these job boards to find qualified diverse candidates.

Recruiting automation software — Recruiting automation software enables companies to automate the process of manually sourcing qualified candidates. These tools help HR personnel, hiring managers, and recruiters create qualified applicant pools for current and future openings Recruiting automation solutions employ artificial intelligence to identify qualified candidates, and some solutions use these AI-based tools to source diverse talent.

Applicant tracking system (ATS) — An applicant tracking system (ATS) manages the recruiting process by collecting and organizing applicant information. These systems are used in the recruiting and hiring of new talent and many integrate with diversity recruiting solutions or offer these features or add ons to their ATS solutions.