Driving Greater Diversity Through Our Inclusive Recruiting Bootcamp
The Client Need
A private liberal arts college was in the process of expanding its technical team and wanted to raise employee awareness on how to augment current recruiting and hiring efforts to be more inclusive. The educational institution invested in an Inclusive Recruiting Bootcamp, which would equip its team with a starting framework to explore the policies, processes, and practices that could diversify the funnel and create an inclusive candidate experience. To achieve this goal, the CTO partnered with ModelExpand to create customized and interactive educational efforts.
The development journey they took with ModelExpand began by assessing the organizational landscape and identifying pain points and areas of success. Leveraging employee insights and a systems audit, ModelExpand created tailored workshop accelerators that provided attendees with foundational knowledge on inclusive recruiting and challenged them to develop an equity-centered hiring strategy. As team members attended the sessions, they were able to better understand their role in creating an inclusive hiring experience and learned practical strategies to map their path to progress, a key goal for the enterprise.
The Solution
“Not only did the Inclusive Recruiting Bootcamp drive greater levels of diversity on the team, it also catalyzed culture change.”
The education journey was spread over three custom-tailored learning sessions. The audience encompassed the university’s entire technical team, who manage the institution’s million-dollar technical strategy.
Gaining Insights from Focus Group Feedback
To begin, ModelExpand conducted focus group interviews with team members to understand their knowledge surrounding foundational DEI topics. With a desire to gauge employee readiness and learn more about their specific organizational context, ModelExpand inquired about what’s working and areas of opportunity. Most responses centered on the difficulty of increasing the diversity of the applicant funnel, and the challenge of developing goals and metrics around recruitment and sourcing in the absence of a dedicated, in-house DEI expert. Synthesizing insights, ModelExpand created a custom Inclusive Recruiting Boot Camp for the client, incorporating elements of foundational skill building as well as strategy development.
Building the capabilities of Inclusive Recruiting
In the three-part training series, ModelExpand helped the technical team evolve how they hire. We equipped them with new strategies and tools to mitigate bias and prioritize inclusion. The workshops provided a comprehensive framework for tackling challenges related to diversifying the talent funnel and identifying areas of policy and process improvement. Based on information from focus groups, we designed tailored sourcing strategies to help the team with candidate assessment and selection, providing the team with practical, scalable tools. To encourage longer-term sustainable change, we provided a complete suite of resources and recommendations designed to address the unique gaps and needs of the team. Post-program, the team members embedded practical, tangible learnings into their recruiting and sourcing efforts.
Results
Not only did the Inclusive Recruiting Bootcamp drive greater levels of diversity on the team, but it also catalyzed culture change. Following the skill-building sessions, the university’s technical team reported heightened awareness and action regarding inclusive recruiting. The information from the training aided those responsible for talent attraction efforts, and it also tasked those outside of talent acquisition to play a key role in creating an inclusive candidate experience. Members across the team were empowered to utilize the strategies advanced in the courses, and learned diversity wasn’t a ‘pipeline problem,’ but a process problem. Armed with the information from ModelExpand, the team was able to reduce bias in their existing policies and practices to ensure equitable opportunity in the hiring process. This led to the development of an overall more efficient and effective hiring process.
In a post-program debrief with the ModelExpand team, the CTO reported that their next round of hires was the most diverse they’ve ever seen - crediting the training and tools ModelExpand provided with this result. Not only were team members leveraging ModelExpand’s inclusive recruiting checklist and sourcing roadmap, but they were also incorporating elements of the strategy they created in their day-to-day. In the end, the system improvements they made mitigated the effect of bias on hiring decisions and helped the team hire a more diverse team.
Are you satisfied with the results of your current initiatives?
What can be done differently to improve them?
Let us help you create meaningful shifts in your organizational diversity.
