By Zoe Morris
Having a clear diversity statement is becoming an effective way to appeal to employees from previously overlooked demographics that the technology industry is now keen to attract. With a critical shortage of skills that is swiftly becoming a crisis, trying to make the sector a more inclusive environment is essential for any business that is hiring tech professionals. As a result, diversity statements have become a crucial part of the recruiting strategy to make the process as open as possible and encourage a broader range of applicants than ever before.
When only 2% of Google’s workforce is black, it’s clear that promoting a positive and inclusive company culture has to be a priority for organisations in an industry that struggles to consider itself as diverse. There’s an obvious path into the industry for straight, white males, which is why an effective diversity statement is vital so that those from underrepresented groups can easily envisage being a good cultural fit within your organisation.
When Deloitte surveyed executives in 2018, there was a 32% increase in those who said inclusion was a top priority. However, in some recent research that we carried out, only 61% of professionals working within tech said that their employer has a clear diversity statement. Having more than a third of employees being unaware of this is slightly troubling reading. The question is how to change it.
Getting started
Thankfully, a diversity statement is a relatively simple document to create, so there’s no need to worry about it being a time-consuming, all-encompassing project. It’s easy to assume that it requires pages and pages of well-researched facts and figures and being legally tight, but it’s much more straightforward than that. Your diversity statement is a simple summary of your company and the people and culture within it.
Rather than worrying about your hiring process or legal ramifications, your main focus is to consider the sort of people you aspire to hire. Whether that’s gay, straight, white, black, male, female, the main point you want to get across is that your organisation is proactively inclusive and you have a culture where people of all backgrounds can thrive.
Most companies aim for less than 100 words, with a short, punchy title. In fact, that’s perhaps the hardest part of creating yours. Try coming up with something a little catchier than “our diversity statement”. Similarly, it doesn’t need to be a world class pun, just something that summarises very clearly what your statement then expands upon.
Positive results
Having an effective diversity statement can only leave your organisation with a positive outcome. The way the hiring process is changing is clear evidence of this. The modern jobseeker is much more socially switched on, with a company’s ethical decisions impacting directly even during the application process. When asked if they’d apply for a job knowing that an employer had a gender pay gap, for example, 80% of millennials said they wouldn’t consider it.
Working in an industry that is already desperately trying to find ways to fill skills gaps, you can’t afford to alienate that sort of percentage of potential applicants. The balance of power is tipping more and more in favour of the jobseeker, and coupled with how much easier it is to do even basic research on an organisation, means a high-value professional will be looking at the company they want to work for in more detail than ever before. That makes a diversity statement an almost impossible omission for an employer whose priority is having the best available professionals working for them.
Usually, any changes would be presented with a “good news/bad news” line. However, when it comes to creating an effective diversity statement, it’s impossible to introduce it as anything other than just the former. It’s simple to create, will have a positive impact on your organisation, as well as the wider industry itself.
Introducing yours should be a priority if you want to get a head-start on making sure the best tech professionals want to work for you, at a time when they’re in scarce supply.
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Zoe Morris is President of niche IT staffing firm Nelson Frank and has almost 20 years of experience working in the recruitment industry.