Nine Strategies to Hire Diversity of Thought In Your Organization

Are you serious about leveraging the diverse skills and talents of your workforce to create new products and services that will make your customers take notice time and time again?

If you want to be ahead of the competition, and bring in more innovation, then think with a diversity of thought mindset.

If you always recruit from the same places, with the same methods, you will always get the same people.
In today’s competitive market you need to be creative. You have to go where the candidates are and have a long enough lead-time to get a good selection of candidates.

Here are nine winning strategies to ensure you hire employees that bring diversity of thought.

• Research and develop a list of colleges that historically have large numbers of women, people with disabilities, and people from different cultural, ethnic and racial backgrounds. Send recruiting teams to those schools.
• Expand your recruiters’ perspective. They may be conscious of recruiting people across the diversity spectrum, but are they looking for people who are the “exact right fit” meaning people who think exactly like you? On the other hand, are they listening and looking for people with new ideas, who are creative problem solvers, and innovators?
• Are they looking for people who look different than you, but who buy their suits at the same place, or are they going beyond the suit, shoes, and haircut, to recruit employees who bring diversity of thought and innovation to your business?
  A CEO of a facilities management company wanted to hire more female managers.
  Rather than recruiting from his industry, he started attending meetings of women in real estate. “I wanted to find women who would bring different experiences so we could get fresh ideas. I looked for women who understood property management from the client’s perspective, and would challenge the way we’ve always worked. We now have several women in decision making positions as a result, and we’ve been able to better serve our clients.”

• Your criteria for interviewing and hiring should never be based on someone who went to the same school, is the same religion or shares your gender or sexual orientation. Have a diverse panel conduct interviews so you can get other perspectives.
• Begin to recruit from middle and high schools. Attend career days and come prepared to discuss the benefits of working for your organization and your industry. Talk to teachers and other students, to find out if someone has an interest in a subject related to your industry. A client recently told me a story about going to a high school, and meeting a student who didn’t have the highest grades, and at first glance didn’t appear to be a potential candidate for their organization.

  However in talking to one of the science teachers, he discovered that the young man was brilliant in physics, and math. My client jokingly said, “I think I may have found our next Nobel Prize winner.” He was so impressed with the young man, he established a mentoring relationship with him, and would like him to be an intern when he gets to college, and of course ultimately be hired.

• Contact various student groups on mainstream campuses and ask them to suggest the best candidates, or include notices about your organization in their newsletters, Linked In groups, or other social media used for communication. Post links to articles about your company on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Student peers may be aware of the hidden genius of others who are not in the limelight.
• Develop relationships with diversity related organizations; BLACK STUDENT UNION, NATIVE AMERICAN STUDENTS ORGANIZATION, ASIAN-AMERICAN STUDENT UNION, MECHA, LGBT organizations, etc) and sponsor events with them.
• Spend time listening, and getting to know people how are potential recruits. Ask them for their insights and observations about your organization, and what they would change or do different.
• Organizations grow dramatically, and exponentially increase their market share when they bring together people who are different from each other in terms of culture, religion, sexual orientation, gender, ethnicity, and provide opportunities for them to share different experiences, talents, and bring perspectives in order to solve problems and create new products. One of your jobs as a leader is to access and mine that diversity of thought, and let it shine, or your organization and the people in it will wilt and fall behind. The choice yours. Hire creatively.