does your RPO partner have a diversity improvement plan?

The need for competitive advantage in talent acquisition is greater today than ever before. Spurred by a widening skills gap in a battleground for talent, organisations look to every possible avenue to gain this advantage. Diversity hiring provides this in multiple ways. It connects with diverse customers, opens up a larger canvas of employee skills and capabilities, and builds a formidable reputation and employer branding.

How can companies ensure that their recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) partner has the right diversity improvement plans?

1. Starting at the sourcing stage

Looking at where your RPO partner sources their candidates from will give a good idea as to how they practice diversity hiring. Do they use the best job boards or social media groups? Which are the publications and channels they advertise your openings? How do they publicise your organisation’s vision, culture and diversity principles? An assessment of their candidate pipeline for your requirements can throw effective light on the above questions.

2. Incorporating diversity Initiatives in the recruitment process

To ensure that your RPO partner incorporates the right diversity efforts in their recruitment processes, first familiarise them with your organisation’s diversity policy. Analyse their recruiting processes and find points of synergy that needs to be maintained and sustained. Provide suggestions on how to better integrate the elements of your diversity policy into their processes.

3. Measuring diversity improvement

The right diversity recruitment metrics help measure the effectiveness of your RPO partner’s improvements in diversity practices. It gives your company a more granular view on how your RPO partner can integrate your vision at every level in their recruitment processes.

At the resume stage, it lets you know how many resumes of diverse candidates have been presented, and from which sources. Importantly, it provides a good measure of how your RPO partner has improved their diversity sourcing in a period of time. At the interview level, metrics can be designed to ascertain the strengths and limitations of both the interview process and the interviewers’ skills towards diversity hiring.

The offers and acceptance figures may be tracked to assess if diversity targets are being met or surpassed – they can then be looped back to the overall process for improvements. Specifically, acceptance ratios give valuable insights on how to handle diversity candidates and align improvements to your organisation’s business goals.

The right talent analytics tools and techniques can provide useful insights on employer brand effectiveness across different diversity candidate demographics. Such insights driven-actions will boost quality talent acquisition – both from external sources and internal employee referrals. They can also help to determine the impact of diversity hiring on organisation performance and revenues.

When effectively measured and monitored, companies can enable their RPO partners to improve on their diversity hiring practices. It lays a firm foundation for true partnership in building an inclusive workforce and enhancing the employment brand.