How to identify the gaps in your DEI candidate experience

May 14, 2021

 

iCIMS Staff

6 min read

We all fear the dreaded candidate response: “Thanks for considering me for this opportunity, but…” 

It’s heartbreaking when a favorite candidate takes themselves out of the running. Not only that, but candidate drop-off slows your hiring, increases cost-per-hire, and is just plain stressful. As you can imagine, it gets even more complex when looking at your DEI hiring strategy. If you didn’t design your hiring process with their specific needs in mind, candidates from historically excluded groups (HEGs) might feel unwelcome. 

Due to that complexity, roles for diversity-focused recruiters jumped 800% between 2017-18 and 2019-20, according to Gartner TalentNeuron™ data. Companies serious about DEI know that specialized talent acquisition professionals can ensure their hiring journey isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach. 

All organizations have a responsibility to listen to those from historically excluded groups and tailor the hiring experience to their wants and needs. Plus, due to unconscious bias, there must be extra measures to ensure an equitable experience for candidates from HEGs, such as AI and anonymized resumes.  

Talent from HEGs drops off for many reasons—your exclusive job description, a lengthy application process, and a lack of diversity on your interview panels. There’s plenty that can go wrong and decrease the representation in your hiring pipelines. How can you safeguard your processes to get ahead of potential pitfalls instead of reacting to problems as they arise? 

It’s key to have comprehensive insights into your hiring funnel, from sourcing to advancement, so you can identify where your hiring process could be more equitable at every stage. Many organizations lack the insight to do that—or have disorganized data that takes hours, days, even weeks to organize into a useful overview. According to Korn Ferry, 53% of recruiters aren’t using all their hiring data for insights. There’s a lot of valuable information they’re leaving on the table. 

It’s essential to choose an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) that provides you with the insights you need in an easily digestible way. To boost DEI outcomes, make sure you can view each funnel stage broken down by demographic so you have the data you need to act. 

We at iCIMS have been using DEI Analytics to elevate our own DEI hiring program. “These are new insights for me,” said iCIMS Chief People Officer, Jewell Parkinson. “The visual displays make the data interpretation very intuitive.”   

Read on for three specific ways you can use DEI Analytics in iCIMS ATS to minimize drop-off and maintain a diverse talent pipeline: 

1. Set goals based on demographic. To set yourself up for success, define your DEI goals by race, ethnicity, and gender so you can review the progress you’ve made. Suppose you notice you’re behind on hiring women in technical roles. In that case, you can use your recruitment marketing platform to create a virtual hiring event and send dynamic, personalized email campaigns to nurture them after. Plus, you can use AI hiring software to reduce the bias in the resume review process by solely evaluating candidates by skills and experience. 
2. Review the progress of your open jobs. You can even view DEI hiring data by job so you can ensure you’re on track to bring diversity into historically homogenous departments or roles. For example, if you are looking to improve the ethnic diversity in your management positions, you can review the analytics and see which areas need more equitable hiring practices. Let’s say your finance department needs more heterogeneous teams, but qualified candidates are dropping off after the interview stage. You can combine the power of iCIMS hiring data with workforce data from Visier, our trusted partner, to determine the representation of your interview panels and figure out where you can make them more diverse to create a more welcoming experience.
3. Get notifications and act fast. With DEI Analytics, you can set up alerts to let you know if you are above or below your goal for a particular demographic. That way, you won’t even have to check the dashboard to see where you’re doing well and where your processes could use some attention. Take this hypothetical situation as an example. You want to hire more women in technology roles but get a notification that the percentage of women that went through your screening to interview stages dropped. Now you can reach out to your sourcing team right away to ask them to focus their efforts to help. 

While having ATS data can help you identify areas to improve the candidate experience and reduce bias, it’s only one part of a broad set of DEI initiatives. At iCIMS, we see DEI as a holistic, candidate-first journey at every funnel stage, including better employee retention. The talent acquisition software provides you with candidate relationship management software (CRM), employee testimonial videos, beautifully branded DEI site templates, AI to reduce bias, and diversity recruiting tools. 

Companies that want to become top DEI organizations need a plan in place to build an authentic candidate experience, reduce bias, retain top talent, and measure your efforts—every step of the journey. 

Do you want to learn more about reducing drop-off by building an equitable DEI candidate experience? Check out our ebook Inclusive Hiring at Every Recruitment Stage.