How RPO Can Support Your DE&I Strategy
It’s well known by now that a diverse and inclusive workplace can positively impact your business performance and bottom line. And today, while most organizations have diversity, equity, and inclusion top of mind, desiring a diverse workforce versus following through with actually attracting and retaining diverse talent are two separate things.
The factors that prevent a diverse and inclusive workplace from succeeding are deeply embedded in the organization’s culture and potential unconscious bias. This may require someone on the outside looking in, such as an RPO service provider, to support an organization's diversity hiring strategy.
To build a diverse workforce, you’ll first need to focus your efforts on a DE&I-centered recruitment strategy that will effectively attract and engage diverse talent. Implementing and maintaining a successful approach will require significant planning, resources, and time, as well as acquiring leadership and/or stakeholder investment. An RPO provider has deep expertise and demonstrated experience supporting DE&I hiring projects and delivering results. These experts know the best practices and support strategies when it comes to preparing your recruitment infrastructure for diverse hiring, and will consider your DE&I goals along the way.
Uncover Unconscious Bias
An outside RPO provider can advise a partnered company on how to recognize the reality of unconscious bias within an organization and how to take the necessary steps to reduce them. This can include removing gendered language from job descriptions, relaxing requirements for more specific experiences or educational backgrounds that may automatically marginalize groups of applicants, ensuring review of a diverse slate of candidates, pay equity, and more.
Leverage Deep Networks and Attract a Diverse Talent Pool
Effectively hiring for a more diverse workforce begins at the top of the recruitment funnel and thus, it is important that DE&I is embedded in a recruitment strategy from the initial outreach or conversation. RPO providers know where to attract diverse candidate pools and can actively seek out candidates from a wide and diverse range of sources. That includes their own internal candidate databases, job search engines, social media, online marketplaces that target specific minority groups, as well as diversity-focused organizations with associations for underserved populations, women, veterans, people with disabilities, and individuals with criminal records.
By strategizing and utilizing a large variety of sourcing methods, RPO providers can reduce bias that comes with repeatedly hiring from the same place, thus becoming a better ally for underrepresented groups and actively filling the pipeline with diverse candidates for you to select from.
Enhance Employer Brand
Crafting an authentic employer brand can be a great starting point. An RPO provider embeds into your organization to help promote your brand based on hiring needs and your DE&I strategy. They also use their own brand to endorse your organization for greater reach and a more diverse candidate pool.
An RPO partner will ensure that your values are reflected in your messaging and ensure that every brand interaction is inclusive. In doing so, the RPO provider can help you develop an employer brand that aligns closely with the values of underrepresented groups.
Utilize New or Additional Search Tools
Through an RPO provider, you will have access to advanced tech tools that hold great promise for reducing bias in the candidate sourcing, engagement, and screening stages. Many search tools, such as Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), recruiting software, and job boards, have built-in diversity settings that allow recruiters to surface qualified candidates from underrepresented groups based on race, gender, veteran status, and more. In many cases, these tools can analyze search results by censoring names, photos, and any other information pertaining to the candidate’s race, nationality, gender, disabilities, and more to remove bias.
Leveraging the experience of RPO experts and the technological solutions necessary to roll out a comprehensive recruitment strategy can drive your business forward on its DE&I mission and overall recruitment, as well as remove any barriers to entry for underrepresented groups.
Choosing to partner with an RPO provider brings experience that will enable you to proactively build communities of diverse candidates for your specific requirements. These skilled partners are experts in recruitment, provide access to wider talent pools, and have insight into market trends and the latest technology. This can prove invaluable when seeking out the best-specialized talent and meeting your hiring goals.
Additional benefits of partnering with an RPO provider include:
Better candidate quality
Reduced recruiting costs
Reduced time-to-hire
Fully scalable
Consistency and reliability
Analytics and Reporting
Improved company brand
Market Intelligence
Our Ultimate Goal is a Diverse Workforce
Look - yes, we’re running a business (and so are you!). So of course we’ll try to sell our highest quality services through our RPO division, Juno Talent Solutions. BUT as the Ultimate Connectors we value our ability, and find great responsibility, to bring many different perspectives to the table in order to enhance teams. We’re committed to the work of advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion within our communities. We recognize that this commitment requires ongoing work and sustained attention, as well as adaptation to new insights and best practices. We’d be honored to share our expertise and knowledge to better help diversify your workforce and improve your recruitment strategy to incorporate DEI best practices.
Want to talk more about how to diversify your hiring strategy?
We’d be more than happy to chat. Even if we’re not a good fit, we’ve likely got the connections to help take your recruiting game to the next level.