Vital Touchstones for Talent-Conscious Businesses

Building an inclusive talent strategy is an essential practice for every business that wants to stay competitive. Inclusive hiring or expanding the pool of people who are recruited, screened, and hired into your roles provides employers with a broader pool of talent to work with. It increases workforce diversity, and proven driver of business productivity.

But building an inclusive workforce is not so simple. Like any business problem, success hinges on a company collecting and analysing performance data to drive improvement. But for an employer that is just starting to think about measuring the inclusivity of their hiring practices, they should focus on three essential things.

1. Who is in your pipeline?

This is not a statistic so much as an overview of your hiring funnel, but you can’t understand if your pipeline is leaking without first knowing who is entering it and where are they leaving. With this data, companies can build a picture of what their current pipeline looks like and who progresses from one step of the funnel to the next. Companies can use this data to set a baseline for where they are now, and set performance targets grounded in evidence.  Race, gender, age, education level, and veteran status are all common data that many companies use to assess their pipeline composition.

2. Measure the conversion rate at the resume screen.

The first round of pipeline conversion from the job application to the resume review is often the trickiest for non-traditional candidates to move through. By their nature, resumes capture a narrow slice of what a candidate can offer, focusing solely on work experience and education. It is much harder for a resume to effectively communicate whether someone possesses the underlying skills needed for the job, or the attitude the applicant brings to their work every day. Employers should look at who is screened out at this early stage to ensure they aren’t losing out on great talent that looks a bit different from their typical candidates.

3. Study your offer to acceptance data.

This stage of the hiring process offers critical insights into whether you are able to not just attract candidates to your open jobs, but get them to accept your offer. In today’s tight labour market, applicants have more options than ever. But for companies that are focused on inclusive hiring, looking at offers made and offers accepted also provides great insight into how attractive your company and positions are to a diverse set of candidates. If you are doing a great job of getting people to apply for the roles, but as they interact more with the company they leave your pipeline, then it’s clear work needs to be done to plug those leaks.

Pipeline composition, first-round advancement, and offer-to-acceptance are just a few of the yardsticks companies track to understand how effectively they are building and leveraging diverse candidate pools. By measuring these three fundamental data points, employers will quickly be on their way to capturing the business value that comes from developing a more inclusive talent pipeline.

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