How to Ensure You’re Hiring a Diverse Talent Pool

Having a diverse accounting and finance team increases your company’s innovation. Cultivating different perspectives and backgrounds contributes to more creative ideas that effectively solve problems. This leads to better individual, team, and company performance. Building your group of qualified professionals regardless of their gender, background, race, religion, sexual orientation, or other personal characteristics, provides you increased access to top professionals needed to keep your company moving forward.

Here are five ways to include diversity in your candidate pool.

Revisit Your Job Postings

Rewrite your job ads to include language that speaks to a larger range of candidates. Certain words tend to discourage different types of candidates from applying. For instance, ads with words such as “ambitious,” “assertive,” and “self-reliant” tend to attract more male applicants. Ads with words such as “committed,” “interpersonal,” and “responsible” tend to attract more female applicants. By eliminating such gender-coded words, you can reduce the bias in your job ads. This includes using neutral job titles and descriptive language that includes both male- and female-coded descriptors.

Target Your Sourcing

Source candidates from diverse places they tend to hang out. For instance, if you’re looking for high caliber female finance candidates, this may include online and offline groups dedicated to women in finance. If you seek veterans, LGBTIQ people, or people with autism or disabilities, advertise your jobs in forums they may visit or magazines they may read. Niche job boards such as Diversity Working, Hire Autism, Hire Purpose, Recruit Disability, and 70 Million Jobs are options as well.

Request Employee Referrals

Ask your diverse employees to refer people they know. They should have networks of people with backgrounds similar to theirs. Encourage your team members to share job postings with their connections. Provide tools to promote company culture. Show that you value teammates’ ideas and input.

Provide Targeted Internships

Offer internships to people with a specific background. Reach out to local schools and community groups to form connections with students—team up with established programs that encourage growth. Internships provide work experience and immersion in company culture for potential new hires. Seeing firsthand what your company is like encourages diverse candidates to join your team.

Refocus Your Screening Process

Reconsider the traits to look for in candidates. Think about which skills, experience, and qualifications are most important for the role. Make sure they’re not favoring one group of people with similar backgrounds over other groups. Evaluate your interview questions and testing process. Determine whether the results are being steered toward specific types of people more than others. Include a diverse range of peers in conducting these evaluations. Change your methods as needed.

Diversify Your Talent Pool

Focusing on diversity among candidates increases engagement, productivity, and team performance. You gain access to a broader range of skills and experience needed to solve problems and drive innovation.

Find diverse talent by partnering with Casey Accounting & Finance Resources. We provide the experienced candidates needed to help bring your business to the next level. Get started with us today.