Inclusion & Diversity: Adapting Your Recruitment Process
Inclusion & Diversity: Adapting Your Recruitment Process

Inclusion & Diversity: Adapting Your Recruitment Process

Category
HR
Survey / Benchmark

Study from Firstalent

This article stems from a survey on diversity and inclusion practices in startups conducted by Firstalent and Imagine legal design. You can find the full article 👉 right here.

Key Ingredients for Your Job Listings

Drafting job listings requires special attention to minimize exclusivity. To do this, you should:

Statistically, women apply when they have 100% of the skills described in the job listing, compared to 50% for men.
Use inclusive language, including these three main conventions:
  • Avoid using the antonomasia of the common nouns "Woman" and "Man."
Use the language of the country so that everyone can understand your job listing (including the job title). Writing it directly in a foreign language will prevent people who do not speak that language from understanding the position.
Focus on the expected results rather than the profile, skills, and education.

Example regarding education: Prefer "Bachelor's degree in management" over "graduate of a business school."

Example regarding the profile: Avoid expressions like "Young and Dynamic," as an experienced candidate can be just as dynamic as a 25-year-old.

📢
Use the Gender Decoder to check if a job listing employs gendered language coding (for job listings written in English).
Job paragraphs
Non-inclusive
Inclusive
Missions
→ He will have to develop and nurture the community; → He will need to analyze the market and identify potential candidates; → He participates in the HR strategy by implementing an optimized recruitment process; → He is proactive and provides advice to the HR teams.
→ Implementation of a proactive and efficient recruitment strategy for all our teams: media, commerce, tech, marketing, and operations in partnership with [...]. → Independent management of the student recruitment campaign for January 2022: defining needs, acquisition strategy, selection, and integration of interns. → Ensure that the candidate experience is as enjoyable as possible for all our candidates! → Monitoring and reporting of recruitment activity.
Profile and Experience
→ Young and dynamic with a maximum of 5 years of experience → Residing in Ile-de-France → Graduated from a top 10 business school master's program Technical Skills: - Project management and engineering - Network animation, community management - Proficiency in project tracking tools Softskills: - Entrepreneurial spirit - Creative and proactive - Autonomy, organizational capacity - Adaptability and flexibility - Reactivity and initiative-taking - Availability and involvement - Analytical and synthesis skills - Ability to work in a team (in pairs and trios in particular) - Interpersonal ease, ability to adapt to various interlocutors - Open-mindedness gained through various international experiences - Ease in written and oral communication
There is no typical profile at [...], we all come from different backgrounds and that's what makes us strong! We invite you to apply if you are motivated and interested in media and in the field of employment in general, and if: → You have an excellent level of speech because you will be the ambassador to our candidates! → You're not afraid to manage multiple projects simultaneously and you know how to organize yourself. → You are curious and resourceful: you can take an interest in any type of subject (HR, organization...) and quickly understand the different stakes.

Diversify Candidate Sources

This can be achieved by widening the distribution of job postings on institutional job boards (APEC, Pole Emploi), educational institutions (schools, bootcamps, etc.), community platforms (50inTech, CFO Connect), or professional networks (People of Color in Tech, Workforce Opportunity Services).

Here's a list of platforms where you can post your job listings to diversify your candidate sources:

Adapting the Candidate Selection Process

The Analysis Grid

To ensure the objectivity of your recruitment process, nothing beats "Job Scorecards," inspired by the WHO methodology.

For each skill or task, define one or more questions that will allow you to objectively evaluate the candidate.

Scorecard

Skills to assessDescriptionSkill AssessmentRate #Comment

Description of the skill, what the candidat should achieve

Interview question? Case study?

Rate during interview

Comment that explains the rate the interviewer gave during interview

Stages of the Recruitment Process

At BackMarket, a common interview framework has been established. It limits the maximum and minimum number of interviews based on the types of interviews recruiters want to conduct. In the end, each process includes 5 interviews:

  1. A recruiter call
  2. A case study
  3. A "technical" or "hard skills" interview
  4. A "cultural fit" interview: based on the company's key principles to avoid judgments based on the recruiter's personal feelings
  5. A final check with the CEO.

Question Formulation

The framework also includes pre-established and inclusive questions. For example, instead of asking, "Can you do X?" it's better to ask, "Give me an example where you demonstrated X."

Seek Assistance from a Specialized Firm

To ensure that you adapt your recruitment process effectively, you can enlist the help of specialized recruitment agencies or HR experts:

  • Engage specialized recruitment agencies:

Foster Diversity Internally

Here are several actions you can take to foster diversity within your company and educate your teams:

IMPLEMENT A DIVERSITY CHARTER This charter is a commitment text proposed for signature to any employer who, in a voluntary approach, wishes to promote diversity and go beyond the legal and regulatory framework against discrimination. 👉 Example of Solvay's diversity charter 🇫🇷
TEST YOUR TEAM'S BIAS Most of the time, discrimination is unconscious and often occurs through cognitive biases (automatic tendencies to adopt an attitude). 👉 Take the Implicit Associations Test 🇺🇸
RAISE AWARENESS AND TRAIN YOUR TEAMS

For disability awareness:

Disability Awareness Kit🇫🇷

  • Provide training on diversity and inclusion:
HIRE A DIVERSITY OFFICER Like 27% of companies in the 2020 Startups Diversity & Inclusion survey, you can hire a dedicated diversity officer internally. Their main goal is to define the company's internal policy and implement awareness projects and actions for employees (partnerships with associations, organizing seminars and training, etc.). What skills and qualities are required? Find all the information here.
ESTABLISH A PAY GRID

For comparable education, position, and company, the gender pay gap in France was 9% in 2021.

IMPLEMENT QUOTAS

The Copé-Zimmermann feminization law in France requires companies to have 40% women on their board of directors.

For More Information

👥Digest: Recrutement Diversifié & Inclusif