How to Hire Employees Online and In Person: An Inclusive Guide

You may already be familiar with inclusive, diverse, equitable and anti-racist movements, but putting these ideals into practice as HR leaders requires courage and dedication.

Frank Newman, Founder of Newman Human Resources Consulting Inc., states better hiring practices come from improving the intercultural competence of your organization’s team and leadership, adopting a culturally adaptive leadership style and having regular, open conversations with your prospects and employees.

Foster a workplace culture which emboldens all individuals to be unafraid of being vulnerable and honest about their feelings, behaviours, challenges and opportunities.

Newman has created a 4-step people processes framework, which acts as a starting point for making major steps of the hiring process more inclusive and accessible. It includes:

• Recruiting: Are you diversifying where you source your talent? How are you actively combatting interviewer bias? The Society for Human Resources Management identified different types of interviewer bias, and has created a bank of resources for those looking to conduct more inclusive interviews.
• Talent Management: Does your organization hire top talent only? How does your team define top talent or identify top performers? Talent recruitment professionals have shared strategies for identifying, recruiting and retaining successful employees.
• Communication: Who writes your organizational messaging? How is this messaging communicated? Can you identify underlying biases present in your communications? There are great resources available to help revise your content.
• Sponsorship and Mentoring: How does your team support marginalized talent? Mentorship matters for talent development and can also help build a sense of community.

Hiring doesn’t need to be made more complicated than it already is, especially with the accelerated shift to remote work.

Instead, by reimagining the hiring process to create more equitable workplaces, your organization will be able to move forward by challenging harmful assumptions about prospective talent and current employees more efficiently and effectively.