Diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace can affect your business in a positive way. Companies with diverse talent on their management teams see a 19% increase in revenue compared to less diverse competitors according to BCG research. In a similar study, Josh Bersin found that companies with inclusive workplaces see 2.3 times higher cash flow per employee.
However, unconscious hiring biases can often get in the way of fostering a diverse workforce. Lawless Research revealed that 92% of tech leaders recognize the existence of unconscious hiring bias. Yet only 45% of those leaders do anything about it.
Many companies are turning to technology to remove that bias, creating a diverse talent pool to hire from. We talked to leaders from those companies to learn about what tools they use and how those tools are helping their diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
What diversity & inclusion software tools does your company use to ensure a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workforce? How do you use these tools on a daily basis?
Bri Harrison
Sr. Operations Manager at Armory.io
As an early-stage start-up that’s scaling quickly, tEQuitable has been the key to building an intentional workplace at Armory. tEQuitable’s independence and confidentiality have allowed us to create a greater trust with our employees because the platform gives them a safe space to learn, get professional advice, and confidentially raise concerns outside of our internal HR team. As the Sr. HR leader at Armory, tEQuitable provides me with tailored recommendations and best practices that I need to continually cultivate a sense of belonging as we onboard new employees.
tEQuitable’s ability to work with the employees and the company is the perfect tool for a growing start-up that wants to show its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
tEQuitable is a digital ombuds solution, whose goal is to confidentially allow employees to bring up workplace discrimination and harrassment without requiring direct confrontation. It also offers educational tools and detailed data and insights.
Gary Davis
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Advisory Director at Greenhouse
At Greenhouse, we use our own suite of DE&I features on a daily basis to reduce bias in the hiring process and promote diversity and inclusion in our workforce. These tools help us hire people from diverse backgrounds and build a culture that doesn’t just tolerate differences, but embraces them. The solutions that we use address unconscious bias throughout every stage of the hiring process. Examples include timely, non-intrusive nudges to prompt objective decision making, industry-first Candidate Name Pronunciation feature embedded within an ATS, and auto-reject and auto-advance application rules to assess potential candidates on credentials and merit alone.
Portia Kibble Smith
Executive Recruiter and Diversity & Inclusion Lead at Karat
Karat conducts thousands of technical interviews each year, and the number one piece of advice we share is to level the playing field by using a structured scoring rubric for interviews and hiring decisions. Structured scoring rubrics make it possible for hiring teams to evaluate candidates consistently and fairly by reducing the opportunity for interviewers to inject their own unconscious bias. They put candidates who meet with different interviewers on a level playing field by standardizing what competencies are being evaluated, as well as providing consistency in language and rating scales.
They help interviewers and hiring managers by making it clear which competencies matter. This helps guide which questions to ask in the interview, and where to spend time evaluating the candidate.
Michael D. Brown
President of the Michael D. Brown Company
As an African American with a lengthy management and consultancy career, I have seen in all its elaborateness the need to automate hiring to make it more diverse and inclusive. But which is the best diversity and inclusion technology I will go with? I go for Entelo.
With Entelo, it is much easier to exile biases from our hiring process, enabling us to build and sustain remarkably diverse teams. One thing I like about Entelo is its capacity to pick out underrepresented but deserving candidates from the bunch of applications I receive for available positions. Candidate badges enable us to pick out candidates from designated minorities groups. In the Unbiased Sourcing Mode, I can focus on candidate capacity and not other extraneous additives like gender or ethnicity. This way, we can largely eliminate that unconscious bias that typically stains our sourcing process.
With Entelo, it is much easier to measure how my diversity hiring is going and possibly improve on it. Consequently, I can enhance my accountability while ensuring compliance to federal diversity regulations.
Maria Barrera
Head of Marketing at ChartHop
I’m a big believer in the power of owning your DEI data to drive transparency and accountability. When companies know where they stand, they can identify areas where they are falling behind on their DEI goals – and rectify them.
Many companies outsource data collection, visualization, and analysis. That means they often don’t know how the whole employee experience – from hiring to performance management to employee engagement and belonging – breaks down across demographics. Not only are they not able to spot the gaps, they also can’t measure the impact of new initiatives, a key component of ensuring DEI efforts are driving employee engagement, retention, belonging, and happiness.
I get so excited about ChartHop’s DEI data collection and reporting features because the ability to support and analyze any aspect of an employee’s demographic information – through factors such as race, gender, sexuality, education level, veteran status, and more – allows for an incredibly comprehensive view of how our employee’s lived experience brought them here and what they need to succeed. After all, you can’t change what you don’t know.
Jenna Carson
HR Manager at Music Grotto
We use a software called Pipeline to help us combat issues like the gender pay gap and the race gap. Pipeline helps us understand how equality and diversity impacts every hire, company review, or staff analysis we complete.
The idea of including diversity and inclusion in the workplace has become commonplace, we’re glad of that and we’re glad that Pipeline has helped us understand the benefits of it in new ways. Our HR team inputs all of our company information into Pipeline and the software analyzes the data for us and then creates predictions relating to people, finances and inclusion strategy. For example, it even tells us what the long term financial benefits are of changing people’s salary.
Prior to using Pipeline, we had hired Diversity & Inclusion specialists to review our work and help us create a positive culture shift that impacted how staff act and feel. We will still do that occasionally but Pipeline has more tangible benefits we can use daily. We use the data from it’s AI in weekly HR reviews and we use its financial data in our daily finance meetings.
We want staff to know we are doing what we can to create an equal workplace and will introduce this tool to all staff when we do equality reviews over Black History Month & Women’s History Month.
What’re my next steps?
Check out our detailed landscape on diversity and inclusion hiring tools, with information on pricing, ROI, benefits, pitfalls, and more. By putting a bigger emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion in the talent acquisition process, your diversity initiatives will get a boost from the get-go.
Once you decide to use a tool, decide on a few metrics for measuring success. That way, you can have a true sense of what’s working and what isn’t. As time goes on, you’ll paint a clearer picture of what needs to change in your organization.
This post originally appeared on SelectSoftware’s blog where we write about the latest in HRTech.