What every recruiter needs to know about gender
Most companies recognize the importance of diversity: it can drive innovation and adaptability, improve financial performance, encourage customer loyalty, and, of course, provide equal opportunities to people who historically haven’t been given a chance.
Building a diverse team starts with recruitment, and some recruitment systems and practices perpetuate (often unintentionally) bias. So how can you make sure you’re attracting and hiring the best and brightest talent?
Here’s how you can create a more gender-diverse team by reimagining how to integrate gender into your recruitment practices.
Reaching the right people with the right message
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First, where do you advertise job openings, and who frequents those sites? Consider diversifying where and how you advertise. Some job sites allow only paid subscribers to access certain job postings. If yours is one of them, then it’s likely only people with access to more money are seeing it (and this could exclude women, LGBT+, non-binary, and ungendered people).
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You can also more actively recruit women and gender minorities by advertising on specialized job boards. Betterteam provides a list of job boards specifically focused on women, and the Human Rights Campaign provides information on sites for LGBT+ job seekers. You can also reach out to LGBT+ and Women’s Resource Centers at local universities and local organizations that support women, trans, non-binary, and ungendered people. For example, Trans Can Work hosts gender inclusive career fairs, and Reaching Out LGBTQ MBA and Business Graduate hosts an annual conference.
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Next, you need to make sure you aren’t excluding or dissuading diverse applicants because of how your job description is written. Commonly used words like ‘competitive’ and ‘dominate’ are masculine-coded, while words like ‘collaborative’ and ‘supportive’ are feminine-coded, and might discourage applicants of a gender which doesn’t ‘fit’ with these descriptors. There are many resources for writing gender-neutral job descriptions, and online tools such as this Gender Decoder, Textio, and Applied which will automatically scan your job descriptions.
Demonstrate to candidates that your company is inclusive
When candidates peruse your website, what message do they get about what it’s like to work at your company? Be sure that you’re highlighting photos and stories of gender-diverse employees. Also highlight what diversity and inclusion initiatives you have, and how your benefits are inclusive of people of all genders.
Make sure that your application system allows flexibility. Instead of creating an unwieldy drop down list or further alienating non-binary and ungendered people with an “other” category, have comprehensive but limited options, and include an option such as “my gender isn’t listed” where people can enter a customized response. Also, it’s helpful to include a disclaimer about why you’re collecting this information, how you will protect the applicant’s privacy, and how the information will be used (for example: “In order to ensure diversity in recruitment we collect data on gender of applicants. This information is analyzed at the aggregate level and no personal information will be shared.”). If you have to report sex-disaggregated data within certain categories, you could include two questions - the first asking for which of the categories the candidate prefers to report as (explaining that this is for mandatory reporting but will not be used in any capacity other than that), and the second asking for their gender (which will allow them more flexibility). For more ideas on how to create inclusive forms, check out this article from Reimagine Gender.
You probably will need to know someone’s pronouns and possibly their title/honorific. As with gender, it’s best for both of these to have a customizable box where people can provide what works best for them, or at the very least have a multiple choice selection list (and a field to enter custom terms). To learn more about commonly used pronouns and how to use them, Reimagine Gender has developed this brief on pronouns; additionally, here is a useful explainer, and an interactive site which lets you practice using pronouns. For titles/honorifics, Mx. (often pronounced “mix”) is probably the most common gender-neutral title you’ll encounter, but here’s a list with information on pronunciation and usage of lots of other gender-neutral titles.
These types of details signify to applicants that your organization understands and embraces gender diversity, and will support everyone in being and expressing their full self at work.
Candidate Review
Unfortunately, unintentional bias can often mean discounting potential candidates as soon as you see their resume. People with white-sounding names and male-sounding names are more likely to get responses on applications.
To start, you can learn more about hidden bias, and provide unconscious bias training to your team. This is important to address the root of the problem. You can also use blind recruitment, a practice in which you remove personally identifiable information from resumes. This list of tools from Recruiting Daily includes several software tools that can be used to implement blind resume review.
If you use an automated hiring algorithm to review candidates, you should examine the algorithm to see how it might be perpetuating bias. You could carry out spot checks, or compare the algorithm’s choice with a manual review of resumes. Algorithms were designed by people, so these people’s unconscious biases might be programmed in.
Interviews
Make sure that someone has pulled the candidate’s stated pronouns and title/honorific from the application system and shared it with the hiring team. Communicating this information should be common practice (For example: “We’ll be interviewing Mx. Smith at 3:00pm, they use they/them pronouns” or “We’ll be interviewing Ms. Johnson at 4:00pm, she uses she/her pronouns”). As part of your diversity and inclusion training, make sure your team knows how to properly use a diverse range of pronouns.
It’s important that someone on every interview panel is well-versed in the company’s diversity, inclusion, and gender policies and inclusive benefits. Recruitment in many job fields is highly competitive, and candidates can be picky. Diversity, inclusion, and equity is important to the majority of today’s job seekers, and of course inclusive benefits could make-or-break a candidate’s interest in your company. That being said, don’t assume you know what benefits will appeal to someone (in other words, don’t only explain maternity benefits to someone who uses she/her pronouns, or don’t only mention coverage of same-sex partners on your health insurance plan to someone who worked at their university LGBT resource center). These initiatives and benefits should be framed to everyone as part of what makes your company an inclusive and desirable place to work.
Interview structures themselves can also be unfair, and might not always lead to selecting the candidate best suited for the job. Be sure to have a standardized interview process, making sure that you’re asking each candidate the same questions, and comparing them equally. Also consider implementing work sample tests, so that you’re judging candidates on how they do the job, rather than more intangible qualities. Take a look at this article to get more ideas about how to create a more equitable interview process.
By integrating gender into your recruitment process, you’ll be able to build a more diverse team, and show candidates that yours is a company where they can be their true selves and grow both professionally and personally. Who doesn’t want to work somewhere like that?