Best Practices for Sourcing Diverse Candidates

As a recruiting professional, you may ask yourself “How do you define the term diversity in the professional sense?” 

Diversity refers to the variety of differences that exist among people, including but not limited to differences in race, ethnicity, gender, age, religion, culture, language, abilities, socio-economic status, sexual orientation, and other individual characteristics. It involves recognizing, valuing, and respecting these differences and promoting inclusive practices that allow all individuals to feel welcome, accepted, and valued.

Recruiters and Talent Sourcers have the ability to source diverse candidates and leads online. There’s a variety of different ways to do this: 

• Employer branding
• Talent sourcing
• External tools
• Internal sourcing efforts

Keep reading to discover the best practices for sourcing diverse candidates that will help you further promote your DE&I initiatives.

How can you promote diversity and inclusion within talent sourcing?

1. Use inclusive language in your job postings and outreach messages to attract candidates from diverse backgrounds.
2. Make sure your job postings and outreach messages are shared on a variety of platforms that are likely to reach a diverse pool of candidates.
3. Consider partnering with organizations and groups that represent diverse communities to help spread the word about your job openings.
4. Leverage social media to engage with diverse candidates and promote your job opportunities.
5. Be open to alternative qualifications and experience that may not fit the traditional mold, but can bring valuable diversity to your organization.
6. Avoid making assumptions about candidates based on their background, and focus on their skills and potential fit for the role.
7. Be transparent about your commitment to diversity and inclusion, and provide information about your company’s values and initiatives in this area.

Sourcing diverse candidates with Boolean strings

Generic Boolean strings can be used for finding specific groups of individuals online to apply to your position. Here are some examples of Boolean strings to use when sourcing diverse candidates: 

(“women owned*” OR “women led*”) AND (“engineer” OR “developer”)

(“multilingual” OR “bilingual”) AND (“customer service” OR “support”)

(“disability” OR “disabled” OR “accessibility”) AND (“designer” OR “user experience”)

(“LGBTQ” OR “queer” OR “gay” OR “lesbian”) AND (“marketing” OR “communications”)

Using diversity tools to source diverse candidates

Diversity tools can help you scale your efforts to source diverse candidates. Here are a few examples of tools for sourcing diverse candidates:

LinkedIn Recruiting Insights: This tool provides insights into the diversity of your candidate pool and can help you identify potential gaps in your recruiting efforts.

NativeCurrent: NativeCurrent is a recently developed extension tool that facilitates the search for diverse talent online. Through automated Boolean string generation, it can help identify diverse niche groups online, providing valuable assistance to talent sourcers. By expanding their talent search capabilities, NativeCurrent empowers sourcers and recruiters to discover new talent pools. I highly recommend creating an account to explore the tool’s impressive features.

Sourcing diverse candidates with AI

AI can provide significant support to diversity talent sourcing efforts, helping organizations build more diverse and inclusive teams. However, it’s important to ensure that AI tools are designed and deployed in an ethical and responsible manner to avoid perpetuating biases or discrimination.

1. Removing bias: AI-powered recruiting tools can help eliminate unconscious bias in the hiring process by focusing on objective criteria like skills and experience, rather than subjective factors like name, gender, or ethnicity.
2. Expanding the talent pool: AI can help source candidates from a wider range of backgrounds and experiences, including those that may be overlooked by traditional recruiting methods.
3. Analyzing data: AI can analyze data to identify patterns and trends in hiring practices, including where bias may be present and where opportunities for diversity may exist.
4. Facilitating language translation: AI-powered language translation tools can help bridge the communication gap with non-native speakers, allowing for greater access to diverse talent.
5. Improving outreach and engagement: AI can help personalize outreach and engagement efforts to attract diverse candidates by tailoring messages to their interests, skills, and background.

For more tactics on sourcing diverse candidates, read my book A Guide to Diversity Talent Sourcing.

To learn how Cangrade can help you preserve diversity in your hiring funnel book a demo with us today.