Although the foundational goals of diversity recruitment (building relationships, broadening your business’ perspective, establishing community credibility, and better cultural sensitivity) are all desirable outcomes, reaching these goals is no small feat. This is particularly true when the minority populations you’re targeting don’t speak your company’s predominant language.
Just how inclusive is your diversity recruitment campaign?
Bilingual outreach is often necessary to reach the broadest number of candidates and help them feel supported once they’re in. Keep the following tips in mind when planning a multilingual approach to diversity recruitment:
1. Employ Bilingual Team Members
If you want to make your candidates feel at home in your organization, having a few staff members who can speak their native tongue can make a big impact.
Employing team members who are bilingual in relevant languages can help reduce barriers to entry for new minority candidates entering your talent pipeline. Bilingual employees can provide direct training and one-on-one coaching in the language your prospects are familiar with. To get the maximum benefit from your bilingual workforce, seek bilingual candidates who are familiar with the culture and values of the market you’re seeking. Pairing this bilingual approach with cultural experience gives your business important information when seeking out talent, and ensures that candidates will be comfortable once they’re there.
2. Provide Language-Specific Resources
Your diversity recruitment is all about inclusivity. None of your employees should feel that their peers receive better opportunities than them, particularly when racial and cultural issues are involved. To ensure an inclusive and successful environment for all members of your team, provide bilingual or language-specific resources, training tools, and educational materials.
Aside from being part of an effective training strategy, bilingual resources let candidates know that the language they speak won’t exclude them from being part of the workplace culture.
3. Involve Senior Staff
Diversity recruitment must be approached from a top-down perspective.
It’s not always easy to create a bilingual work environment—a well-integrated bilingual workplace requires significant investments of time and resources. Senior staff must acknowledge the need for greater diversity and ensure that business goals are aligned with this outreach. This might mean giving employees access to training materials, changing established recruitment strategies, and re-positioning the placement of resources to ensure both languages are equally represented.
4. Cultivate Community Partnerships
Looking for bilingual employees and diverse candidates? What better place to start than the bilingual communities they live in?
Work to create partnerships in the community you’re seeking. Many people in minority communities are bilingual out of necessity; their insight is critical to the success of your diversity recruitment. Bilingual recruits and community members can help you establish your recruitment efforts more effectively and guarantee that important information doesn’t get lost in translation. Working directly with the community also helps establish credibility in your organization, and provides opportunities to network with bilingual individuals.
5. Include Bilingual Programs
Minority candidates often suffer from a lack of opportunities.
Your organization can fight this trend by including bilingual support for in-house training and leadership development programs. These programs are essential for setting underprivileged populations on the fast-track to success, yet they aren’t always multilingual. Giving your minority candidates the same opportunities as everyone else is an essential part of making your organization a culturally-accessible workplace. Creating bilingual development programs requires coordination across your senior staff, entry level employees, and overall workplace goals.
Bilingual Outreach
Creating a bilingual workplace isn’t always simple, but it is necessary for businesses hoping to achieve large-scale diversity in their workforce. Begin by including as many bilingual native speakers as possible in your hiring process. When you have a team of bilingual trainers on board, you can begin creating multilingual resources and outreach programs to support the underprivileged populations that only speak their own native tongue. Despite the complexity of creating a bilingual workplace, it remains a major differentiator between businesses who preach diversity and businesses that actually support it.
Posted By: Lorenzo Esmoquin
Sunday, February 14th 2016 at 5:28PM
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