“A diverse mix of voices leads to better discussions, decisions, and outcomes for everyone.” — Sundar Pichai, CEO, Google

Startups and corporate giants alike often find it hard to compete in the ever-changing global marketplace. One of the best means to gain a competitive edge is creating diversity in the workplace. Business leaders around the globe are focusing on hiring a diverse workforce, promoting diversity in the ideas and creativity in their workplace. Claiming diversity is not a mere slogan anymore; organisations perceive it as their strength and not just something they need to accomplish for ensuring regulatory compliance.

A research study from McKinsey & Company indicates that companies with ethnic and gender diversity generate 25-33% more profit than the others. Another study by Deloitte finds that approximately 68% of leading organisations are recruiting diverse candidates and investing in technologies to reduce workplace bias. Having diversity in an organisation has been one of the hottest trends for the past 5-years.

This blog is the first of the four that will coherently touch upon the issues of diversity in organisations, including the HR guide to hiring people with disabilities and discussing fair recruitment practices with Equitable Hiring. We will conclude the series by highlighting how Recruitment Smart Technologies is helping organisations to hire a diverse workforce. To begin with, let’s discuss the significance of having a diverse workforce or diversity in an organisation.

Diversity in the workplace implies having professionals from varying backgrounds, which ensures a variety of different perspectives in the brainstorming sessions. People with different experiences share differing solutions to a problem that can lead to new creative and innovative ideas to work with.

Since a diverse workforce implies professionals with varying backgrounds exhibiting different characteristics, they bring in improved and more efficient ways of doing a given task at hand. Having a blend of different skills and experiences, a diverse workforce can cumulatively achieve different sets of goals simultaneously. The business consulting firm, McKinsey & Company, found that a gender-diverse company outperforms its peers by 15% and that an ethnically-diverse one outperforms its competitors by 35%.

AI-driven solutions can help companies to gain diverse workforce by providing a blind and unbiased ranking of candidates by matching their experience and skills with job requirements, irrespective of their gender, age, or ethnicity. Hence, organisations can save time to hire by sparing HR managers from detailed resume screening and eliminate bias during initial evaluation.

A 2-year research study from Josh Bersin found that companies with a diverse and inclusive workforce are 1.7 times more likely to be the leaders of innovation in their market. Surveying and interviewing 450+ global firms, they found that organisations with diversity have 2.3 times improved cash flow per employee over a 3-year period.

These companies have a better environment to be able to deal with personnel performance issues, and are 2.9 times more likely to recognise, groom, and build leaders. Organisations with diversity and inclusion were rated as “higher-performing companies” on the basis of financial, talent, and business outcomes.

One of the major significance of diversity in an organisation is that it empowers a company to reach markets globally and grow in foreign countries, creating opportunities for job promotion and employee development. As the expansion leads to the birth of challenging yet fulfilling career opportunities, organisations easily find employees from a diverse workforce to take expatriate assignments and fit into new roles in a different location.

A diverse workplace provides a unique opportunity for its employees to learn from their colleagues belonging to different cultures. Connecting with people from different backgrounds in a professional setting, an employee can learn from others’ experiences, gain fresh perspectives about work, and develop a whole new set of ideas, resulting in self-development.

A company that values diversity can attract young talents and experienced professionals, adding a competitive edge to the organisation. Every employee in a diverse workforce will have a unique set of skills, including command over specific languages or knowledge of a particular demographic. As the organisation acknowledges the remarkable skills, the employee will feel a sense of belonging that will encourage him to do more for the company.

A research study conducted by Deloitte showed significantly increased employee engagement as one of the outcomes of D&I. Diversity in the workforce also allows the firm to reach a diverse customer base in the international market and increase its market share.

Diversity in a workforce can empower an organisation to meet the specific requirement of different local markets. Clients of a particular country or region can be handed over to professionals belonging to similar backgrounds, making clients feel more comfortable, gaining their trust and loyalty. A diverse workforce helps companies to gain loyal customers who choose to do business with only those firms who exhibit social responsibility in their business practices.

The AI technology can help to reframe the content of job postings that can appeal to more number of qualified candidates from different demographics, thus promoting diversity.

Hiring a diverse workforce promotes the brand value of a company by showcasing it as a company that values differing opinions, ideas, and cultures and that grows by taking everyone together. Additionally, diversity brings benefits in the spheres of client engagement and CSR.

Organisational diversity flourishes the company’s reputation when it demonstrates fair recruitment practices selecting diverse candidates on the basis of merit. This can be done using AI-driven technologies that remove the scope of human intervention in selecting the right candidates, eliminating any distracted or cognizant bias resulting from stereotypes or personal mindset.

As an organisation builds a great reputation for its brand, it manifests into increased profitability and more opportunities for its employees, which in turn results in employee retention. Additionally, a company with its fair employment practices, which appreciates or embraces diversity, attracts a wider pool of talented and well-qualified applicants.

Be it formal employment processes or in the daily treatment of and interactions among employees, studies have suggested that biases can be a significant barrier to diversity and inclusion (D&I). Organisations should mitigate and eliminate these biases to operate ethically, and in turn, to their full potential.

Global leaders and HR professionals of MNCs have begun to appreciate and embrace the use of AI-driven technologies to mitigate biases and support their D&I efforts. One of the recent surveys of IBM/UNLEASH reveals that 65% of senior HR professionals believe AI can help promote diversity in an organisation.

Machines do not exhibit inherent biases, showing no preference towards the gender or ethnicity of an individual. Instead, they work on built-in algorithmic features developed by engineers. When designed and deployed correctly with the right intention, AI can eliminate the attributes that lead to biases. Further, AI can also detect potential biases, specifically those unintentional and difficult to divulge in decision-making processes.

Recruitment Smart Technologies is an HR Deeptech company, offering AI-driven solutions and applying data science to identify different means for promoting diversity in businesses and suggesting the most efficient ways to achieve it. Its advanced machine learning algorithms recognise the nature of bias, if any, and then address them through an AI-based recommendation engine, engendering ethical hiring while protecting the candidate’s identity.

Recruitment Smart has helped its clients to reduce various types of biases by over 40%. It has developed Sniper AI to help organisations in selecting and recruiting the most eligible candidates with diverse backgrounds on merit without exhibiting any prejudice. Sniper AI is built on a powerful Machine Learning algorithm that works more accurately the more you use it. Every search provides more informed feedback to the system, allowing it to calculate better how to match candidates to roles. The software selects the best applicants and helps the recruiter interact with them through the entire recruitment lifecycle without showing any personal preferences or predisposition in terms of region, race, and gender, etc., thus promoting equality, inclusion, and diversity in an organisation.