The value of diverse teams has been well documented, with research showing that diverse organizations are usually more profitable precisely because of the diverse knowledge they’re able to tap into. While this is something that is increasingly well known, something that is less well known is the attraction of a diverse organization in terms of recruiting the best talent.
Research from Harvard Business School highlights, however, that many young people today want to work for diverse organizations, so using your level of diversity in your recruitment campaigns could be hugely effective.
Diverse appeal
The researchers found that job seekers are more inclined to investigate job vacancies at organizations that have a high diversity score (providing that information is actually provided). Interestingly, however, just 17% of the over 3,000 firms studied actually disclose data on either race or gender in 2020.
While public firms in the US aren’t required to disclose workforce demographics, a growing number are choosing to do so via a Human Capital Disclosure that has been added to 10-K filings by the SEC. This requires firms to include in the annual report aspects of their human capital that are important for their performance.
After analyzing almost 180,000 customers of the career service agency Zippia in 2021 to understand what attracted them to jobs, diversity was not often disclosed. Instead, companies would far more often send out information such as salary, location, and job description. The folly of this strategy was demonstrated when the researchers randomly sent out the numerical ranking of the diversity of that employer’s workforce.
This was based on Zippia’s “diversity score”, which was based on things such as race, language skills, education, and gender, and was scored between 1 and 10. The researchers measured the click-through rate on each of the job postings to gauge the interest in the vacancies.
Securing interest
The act of including the diversity score was enough to boost the click-through rate on the job advert by 31% over adverts that just provided more traditional information, such as the salary of the role. What’s more, this interest was especially high among younger workers who lived in areas where diversity issues were particularly salient, which the researchers determined by the number of Black Lives Matter protests that took place per capita.
These results proved to be consistent regardless of things like the gender or education of participants, which strongly suggests that diversity is something that is important across the spectrum. When they sent out questions to participants to enquire why this might be, the researchers found that this attraction was likely to be because it signals the overall quality of the company.
“Many indicate that such information was useful because it signals the quality of the company, highlights the job seeker’s chance of promotion and any potential discrimination, and also helps them find companies with similar values,” the researchers conclude.
