Diversity in the workforce was once considered to be quite a controversial topic. But today, within recruitment circles the buzz around ensuring ‘diversity’ is growing like wildfire – especially within graduate recruitment – and for good reason.

It’s now widely recognised that organisations with a mix of people from different backgrounds and with varying life experiences, foster a richer workplace culture that functions more efficiently and boosts overall company performance. Diversity works because it widens the net, opens minds, and encourages innovation and creativity, which in a rapidly changing world is critical for organisational success.

But how do we ensure that the graduate candidates we are recruiting come from as diverse a pool as possible?

Three ways to build diversity into your graduate recruitment program:

The key to ensuring diversity in your organisation is to actually build it into the recruitment process from the very beginning: to recruit diverse talent at entry-level and from there build the pipeline.

Here are three very powerful ways to build diversity from the bottom of your graduate recruitment funnel:

1. Testing and Assessments

Psychometric tests and skills assessments that are objective, bias-free, fair and standardised across all candidates ensure that the recruitment process is based on a robust framework that virtually eliminates recruiter bias. This means that you increase your chances of getting the right person for the job – not just the one that the recruiter feels a cultural or gender-based affiliation for.

Well-designed tests and assessments manage any unconscious or conscious bias during the recruitment process to ensure a fair and objective result.

2. Diversity Norms

It is important to test your candidates against a population of people that best represents their characteristics. By assessing your candidates’ performance against specific norm groups, be they gender-specific norms, indigenous norms and/or ESL (English as a Second Language) norms, you can measure how your graduate candidates compare to relevant population segments.

3. Video Technology

You can significantly increase your chances of hiring diversity by ensuring that a wider (and therefore more diverse) pool of graduate candidates is given an opportunity to participate in the recruitment process by utilising cutting-edge technologies to make the process much more accessible. For example, video interviewing technology such as Vieple, helps you easily and affordably access a much wider pool of first round candidates from regional areas, interstate and internationally, as well as those with busy family and work schedules.

Want to know more about increasing the diversity through your graduate recruitment?

Testgrid uses a scientific approach by applying relevant data to support best-practice processes in recruitment, development, cultural and gender diversity, social outcomes, performance management and building inspiring workplace cultures.

Want to know more? Contact us today and ask about our solutions for graduate recruitment programs