How to Create a DEI Tech Stack That Improves Diversity in Recruiting

Building your DEI Tech Stack

When building a structured hiring process for any modern organization, it’s imperative you integrate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) into your recruitment strategy. Given the critical role that talent acquisition and recruitment play in the growth of your company, a well-rounded, DEI-focused recruiting process will help to eliminate bias and nurture a more inclusive talent acquisition program.

However, as your organization and recruitment efforts scale, your recruitment teams will inevitably look to add more tools to their suite to help them achieve their goals — ones that support your company’s vision for DEI and recruitment initiatives. This series of integrations is what can ultimately make up your DEI tech stack, and it’s vital to your recruiting team’s success and candidate experience.

At Lever, our platform helps you take a more inclusive approach to recruitment that’s both data-driven and objective. While there isn’t one solution that will help you accomplish all of your DEI objectives, our growing integration ecosystem seamlessly integrates DEI tools with Lever, empowering your teams to nurture that inclusive and fair recruitment program your organization needs.

With innovation in the DEI space comes new integrations and opportunities to drive your inclusive hiring strategy forward. In particular, there are 7 key areas where consistent improvement can help increase equity in your hiring process:

1. Sourcing, job distribution, and referrals
2. Job descriptions
3. Application reviews and screening tools
4. Candidate assessments and tests
5. Individual interviews
6. Data and insights visualization
7. Post-hire initiatives

Equity in recruiting begins with organic candidates: people who find your job post using a job search engine or a career site. And small changes to job titles, responsibilities, and even perks have a meaningful impact on who feels welcome to apply. — Maryam Jahanshahi, PhD, Cofounder and Head of Science, Datapeople

First, let’s consider why diversity hiring is important

When it comes to attracting and retaining top talent, diverse and inclusive organizations are leading the charge. But diversity hiring isn’t just important to hiring managers and recruiters — in fact, 67% of employees consider workplace diversity an important factor when accepting an offer of employment, while diverse workplaces have been shown to improve retention across nearly all employees in an organization.

At the same time, studies have proven that diverse companies are 70% more likely to capture new markets and inclusive organizations are 120% more likely to hit their financial goals. Having a diverse team of talent enables companies to not only better understand and support those with diverse perspectives, but build a robust candidate pool and recruiting pipeline of diverse talent.

Getting started with a DEI tech stack

A strong DEI strategy and tech stack aren’t created overnight, especially as your recruitment needs grow and you scale your talent acquisition pipeline. Knowing what those recruitment needs are, and your TA priorities will inform your approach to choosing the right tech to further your DEI efforts. To ensure you’re choosing the right tools, and not simply adding more tools, consider evaluating the necessary additions to your DEI tech stack against the following criteria:

• Fair, equitable, and unbiased
• Data and insights-focused
• Alignment with your recruiting strategy
• Continuity and longevity post-hire

Any tool you add to your DEI tech stack should be intentional but also enable your recruitment teams to continue working on DEI initiatives beyond the hiring phase. This means that your DEI tools or any diversity tech you use should support both recruiters and successful candidates even after they’re hired and onboarded.

Start with sourcing, job distribution, and referrals

Referrals

It’s common among many organizations to offer incentives or rewards for internal referrals, encouraging existing employees to refer qualified candidates from their personal or professional networks for open roles at your company. However, referrals like these can be ineffective from a DEI standpoint — in many cases, people tend to refer candidates they have a personal connection to or close friends.

The solution? Make your referral programs external. By using tools that expand your company’s referral network beyond those of your employees, you create more opportunities for candidates from diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and skill sets.

Job Distribution

When distributing open roles with your organization, you’ll want to get those roles in front of a vast and diverse range of talent. Your recruitment pipeline may reveal key areas or gaps in which you need to improve or increase representation — but it can be challenging to do that with basic recruiting platforms. Instead, harnessing platforms like Jopwell allows you to get your open roles in front of more diverse communities of candidates while representing your organization as an inclusive place to work.

Creating inclusive job descriptions

In job descriptions, words matter. The language and tone you use in your job descriptions can quickly deter candidates from applying to your organization, especially if the language isn’t inclusive. Fortunately, some tools can help you analyze and optimize the language you use when crafting your job descriptions.

Datapeople Integration

Datapeople is a great platform for writing inclusive job descriptions. With the Datapeople integration, you can write and optimize job posts using language analytics that help you make more inclusive and fair decisions in how you craft descriptions and recruitment communications.

Impact descriptions

Impact descriptions forego the traditional list of responsibilities in job postings in favor of outlining what the candidate can expect to learn, own, and improve once they’re in the role, with a focus on bringing someone’s unique perspectives and experiences to the job. From a DEI perspective, impact descriptions consider a range of factors that help organizations find the best candidate for the role — as opposed to relying solely on whether someone’s professional background matches a list of responsibilities.

Application reviews and screening tools

Anonymous candidate screening

To avoid bias in your application reviews and screening process, consider using an anonymous candidate screening tool or integration that works with your ATS to screen applicants, rather than shortlisting people manually. Various integrations, like MeVitae, redact resumes to help eliminate bias from the review process. Similarly, other integrations like Criteria or Eightfold use anonymous candidate screening paired with data to help you eliminate unconscious bias by matching candidates with the specific skills and experience you’re looking for.

Consider asking yourself the following when evaluating a screening tool:

• Is the tool transparent and fair in how it screens and reviews applications?
• Does the AI/ML model used in the tool take into account representation of broader diverse groups, including candidates with disabilities?
• How does the tool’s AI algorithm protect against inherent biases in AI?

Reference checks and background checks

Conducting fair reference checks

Any reference checks you conduct should be done objectively, so that your hiring team can make bias-free decisions about a candidate and their ability to succeed in a specific role. This is similar to structured hiring and interviewing, where standardized questions are asked in the same order and assessed using the same criteria.

When reference checks aren’t done fairly, companies run the risk of serious compliance issues that expose the organization to a laundry list of anti-discrimination laws, as well as doing your company the disservice of losing out on a potentially excellent candidate. — Mike Fitzsimmons, CEO, Crosschq

How can background checks be leveraged for equitable hiring?

Fair chance hiring means giving individuals with prior convictions or arrests a fair chance in the hiring process. It isn’t a black-and-white approach, but a more equitable and measured way of evaluating candidates to discourage hiring discrimination.

Fair chance hiring presents a unique opportunity for businesses navigating the workforce in the wake of the pandemic. Hiring workers with conviction histories not only creates a more inclusive, diverse workforce, it unlocks a powerful talent pool. — Ken Oliver, Executive Director, Checkr

Individual interviews and panels

Structured interviews with Lever

To mitigate bias and subjectivity, ensure the tools you use in individual and group interviews prepare you with the right questions to ask and the same measuring or scoring model that every team member follows. With Lever, you can conduct both individual and group interviews using structured interview kits, along with hidden feedback that’s only visible to your teams once all members have submitted their feedback.

Candidate assessments and tests

Candidate assessments provide your talent acquisition teams with an unbiased way of evaluating a candidate’s capabilities, while also unearthing unique talents or skills that may not show solely through a resume or application screening. Tools like Bryq use your job descriptions to create a profile of skills, capabilities, and personality traits that candidates will need for the role, and assess candidates based on that profile.

Don’t forget about company culture, specifically your core values. Talent Acquisition teams have a responsibility to uphold your culture but find it challenging to hire for values in a data-driven way fairly and consistently at scale. Diverse values-aligned teams always perform better. — Marlina Kinnersley, CEO of Fortay

Before adding an assessment tool to your DEI tech stack, evaluate each tool against questions like:

• What model does the tool use to assess candidates?
• Does the tool allow for candidate anonymity?
• Can the tool accommodate candidates with disabilities?
• How consistent is the scoring or measuring model?

Data and insights visualization

Measure your DEI pipeline

As your company scales and your recruitment teams pursue deeper DEI initiatives, you’ll need the ability to measure the impact of those initiatives on your hiring process. At Lever, we offer tailored talent analytics that enable you to measure the diversity and equity of your talent pipeline, to help you understand where you can improve upon DEI in your recruiting program.

Continuous nurture post-hire

What happens once you’ve filled an open role and the new hire is onboarding with your organization? Though DEI plays a role in your hiring process, it’s important that it remains a part of your post-hire plan, too. This means ensuring that your DEI tech stack includes tools and resources that recruiters and teams at large can leverage to create more inclusive work environments.

Sentiment and engagement

Starred helps you create surveys that you can use to gather feedback from new hires, driving insights into onboarding, engagement, and sentiment. Fortay lets you send employees quick pulse surveys that provide powerful analytics across the talent lifecycle around engagement, inclusion, belonging, and wellbeing metrics.

Create inclusive communities

In many organizations, employees will create their own groups based on shared interests or experiences. Known as ERGs (Employee Resource Groups), these groups help organizations recruit top talent from diverse candidate pools by learning from existing employees who leverage these groups as a resource for culture, inclusivity, and a sense of belonging. Tools like Slack and Phenom help support these groups, whether in the office or fully remote.

One of a recruiter’s greatest assets is the tech stack they use to help recruit, nurture, and hire top talent. Leveraging tools and integrations in that tech stack that help diversify your pipeline and promote inclusivity in your hiring process is essential to any well rounded DEI strategy. — Caitlyn Metteer, Senior Manager, Recruiting, Lever

Promote pay equality across your organization

Many organizations benchmark salaries and pay scales against their market, but this is only the first step in working towards equalizing compensation within your organization. Orgnostic leverages people analytics to give you deeper insights into your employees, including diversity, equity, and inclusion. Figure, another helpful DEI tool, performs as a compensation management system, using data and analytics that help you detect pay inequity in your organization.

Make your recruiting process a foundation for change with Lever

At Lever, we continue to invest in innovative partnerships for our ecosystem of integrations and tools. As the only ATS + CRM, we’re committed to providing you with the tools and resources you need to recruit, nurture, and retain top talent in your organization.