Essentially, diversity includes the traits that make people unique while inclusion is the behavior that makes people feel welcome. Diversity cannot thrive without inclusion which is why it’s important to have several diversity and inclusion strategies in place for your Total Talent Program. A good place to start is to evaluate your recruitment strategies. Are any of them focused on diversity? If not, they should be. When it comes to attracting and retaining diverse talent, recruitment channels can be utilized to enhance recruiters’ abilities to locate unique and diverse candidate pools.
Once you have diversity-related recruitment strategies in place, it’s also important to track candidate diversity metrics to ensure that job opportunities are reaching diverse talent and all qualified applicants. If you’re able to customize your VMS reporting, consider adding (optional) questions for your contingent workers to answer during onboarding as well. Ensuring that job opportunities are inclusive of all qualified applicants results in workforces that are best equipped to drive and grow your clients’ businesses.
DZConneX (DZX) had a client who configured three additional fields; whether the worker was diverse, whether they were a veteran or not and if yes, what their veteran status was (active duty, disabled veteran, protected veteran, etc.). The contingent workers are not required to answer any of these questions but we were able to still provide the client some insight into diversity in their contingent workforce. You can read the case study here.