How to Use Passive Sourcing to Boost Diversity | IQTalent

It’s hard to argue against the importance of ensuring your talent pipeline is thoroughly diverse. It’s common sense, especially based on the myriad of staggering statistics reiterating the importance of maintaining and developing a diverse workforce.

Just to name a few:

• Companies with a diverse workforce are 35% more likely to experience greater financial returns than their respective non-diverse counterparts.
• The most inclusive decision-making and execution teams performed 60% better than average.
• Around 86% of employees in the study asserted that a diverse workforce would become even more important as roles, skills, and company requirements change.

However, making sure you’re reaching a diverse group of candidates while also sourcing passively can be a bit less straightforward.

Given the overwhelming research supporting a diverse workforce and talent pipeline, it’s about time talent acquisition professionals prioritize reaching diverse candidates through their passive sourcing.

Keep reading to understand the importance of finding diverse talent via your passive sourcing methods, some proven ways to accomplish this, and how to embed these processes into your outreach strategies.

Why Diversify? (Aside From The Obvious…)

Ensuring you gear your passive sourcing efforts to reach diverse candidates is clearly valuable for every reason listed above, but the core of this concept is fairly simple. Diverse teams are more efficient, more creative, and emulate the progress many organizations are trying to make for themselves.

An unfortunate reality for many organizations is that inherent bias seeps into the recruitment process. To address this issue, teams must examine their active and passive recruiting practices closely and find where bias can be reduced or eliminated.

Diversifying your passive talent pipeline is just one step, albeit a gigantic one, to fully putting your diversity initiatives into practice. While passive sourcing in and of itself is a less direct method of recruiting and, therefore, harder to gauge candidate response, there are important steps you can take to control your reach better.

Switch Up Your Outreach Tactics

Fortunately, if you’re seeking to upgrade your passive sourcing strategies to reach more diverse candidates, you’re not alone. In fact, 74% of companies report an increase in outreach to passive candidates. The easiest and most tangible way to make progress in this area is to look at the different avenues of outreach used and how to boost their effectiveness.

Social Media

Keep an up-to-date social strategy employed to make sure your brand looks active on social media and is more likely to pop up in passive candidates’ feeds. Social media is also a perfect place to scope out passive candidates and their potential interests.

Considering nearly half of all job seekers in the U.S. used social media to search for their most recent job, it’s a pretty sure bet you can touch base or at least cross paths with the passive candidates you are wanting to target.

Internal Referrals

One of the best ways to ensure diverse candidates join your team is the utilization of an internal referral program. This way, employees you already have who know the ins and outs of your organization can send people your way that are pre-vetted for ideal fits.

Plus, studies show that referral hires stay 70% longer than non-referral hires. In addition to reducing cost per hire and improving retention rates, internal referrals are also amazing for morale. Not only is the existing employee seeing the difference they are affecting in their organization, but the new employee feels supported and wanted by the team already.

Walk The Walk

Increasing the amount of diverse candidates in your passive sourcing strategies is an admirable quest, but it can mean little to nothing without action being taken to ensure a workforce where diverse people and ideas can flourish. Saying you’re working on increasing diversity measures is easy; actually taking concrete steps to get there requires putting a plan into action.

Create company policies that appeal to diverse candidates

At the most basic level: if you are seeking to increase diversity, you need to ensure it is a visible priority within your company. All talk with no concrete action behind it will effectively make your company look like you lack follow through and that all of these reaches for diversity are shallow and performative. Before you employ tactics to reach a greater group of diverse candidates through passive sourcing, you must make sure you have at least the baseline tactics to bring diversity to the forefront in place.

Ensure your employer branding reflects these initiatives

Once you have your policies in place and have received internal support, make sure you are promoting these initiatives and letting passive candidates, active candidates, and employees alike know where your priorities are.

Enhance your employer brand by incorporating your dedication to diversity (and concurring proof points) into your outreach, social media presence, and brand information.

After looking at a few different ways to upgrade your passive sourcing methods to reach a more diverse candidate pool, it’s clear there are actionable steps you can take to ensure you’re reaching these passive candidates in a genuine, authentic way.

To learn more about Diversify by IQTalent™ or to get started on your passive candidate research, reach out to our team of experts today.