4 Tips to Enhance Diverse Candidate Retention Within Your Workforce
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Posted By: Lorenzo Esmoquin on February 14, 2016 Finding qualified candidates to meet your diversity goals is a daunting task. As all diversity recruiters know, seeking out, interviewing, and onboarding new candidates isn’t a short process. It becomes even more challenging when qualified candidates drop out of your program. Candidates can drop out of your talent pipeline at any time, for any reason. This generally leads to a loss of financial resources and a frustrating lack of your sought-after diversity, but it also creates administrative challenges as well. It’s impossible to build a strong team of workers with candidates constantly jumping ship. To prevent these unnecessary losses and improve your candidate retention, keep the following tips in mind: 1. Cultural Shifts Towards Acceptance Have you ever entered a room and felt the accusing stares of strangers that seemed to indicate “you don’t belong here”? This is a common problem faced by minority populations across the world, and can be a serious blow to morale. Your candidates must not feel like “outsiders” upon entering your talent pipeline. They’re being brought on board in part for the unique value their perspective provides—a mindset that must be made clear and promoted within your business. 2. Build Educational Programs Even with a culturally-accepting environment, lack of information can still be a cause of poor candidate retention. Learning a new job is tough for all of us, particularly those in underprivileged populations who may have less job experience. To prevent candidates from experience frustration with your business’ learning curve, provide as many programs and educational resources as possible for their success. Many candidates will need personal coaching and development to prepare them to work in a new environment. Keep your programs up to date and empower your candidates with the tools they need to get ahead. 3. Dedicated Conflict Management So, your workplace culture is accepting and you have educational programs in place. This is a great start, but unfortunately, problems are still bound to arise. Conflict is a part of any organization, and tends to come up more often with new employees who are still developing. This problem is compounded by the fact that minority populations aren’t always comfortable complaining or rocking the boat in homogenous organizations. This leads to frustration, feelings of helplessness, and eventual candidate dropout. Create dedicated conflict management protocols for your employees. The value of these should be reinforced by senior management, and should be as inclusive as possible. When dealing with conflicts related to new diversity candidates, having representatives from their demographic can greatly help the conflict resolution process. Including bilingual or minority employees on the conflict resolution board will help recruits feel comfortable voicing their concerns and help assure them that their interests are being represented. 4. Promote Cooperation for Growth Even after your culture is optimized, your workers have educational opportunities, and your conflict resolution is established, you may still lose candidates to a lack of teamwork. While generally too mild to fall under the category of formal conflict, senior employees that ignore or deliberately exclude diversity recruits can create significant dropout and turnover from employees after they have been hired. After all, not all employees may value diversity as highly as your organization’s stated desire. Specifically train your staff to work together with new candidates and elicit their opinions on projects. This may require more focused effort than your organization’s general commitment to a more diverse culture. Employees may need to be trained on cultural sensitivity and the best ways to include employees who have different thought patterns than their own. Keep Them on Board Diversity recruitment is just as much about retention as it is about outreach. It doesn’t matter how effectively you bring candidates to the table if they have unpleasant experiences once inside your organization. Word of mouth travels fast, too: if your organization doesn’t treat its diversity candidates with respect, you can bet that future candidates will be harder to come by. Train your team appropriately, figure out how to resolve conflicts, and empower all of your employees with the tools they need to succeed. These initiatives are the best way to retain more of those candidates that you worked so hard to find in the first place. If you enjoyed this article, Join DiversityRecruiting.com today for similar content and opportunities via email! |
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Lorenzo Esmoquin
Senior Editor, DiversityRecruiting.com The Ohio St Univ class of 1991 Member Since March 2015 |
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