How to Make Hiring More Inclusive

There's more to inclusive hiring than hiring people from an underrepresented group and different backgrounds. How does an inclusive hiring practice impact your business? How would it affect your talent pool?

Whether you’re already hiring globally or you’re just testing the waters, building a team inclusively can help you discover—and retain—top-tier diverse talent. 

In this article, we’ll explore how to make hiring more inclusive and form a diverse team. We’ll break down why you should consider implementing inclusivity measures (such as inclusive recruitment) in your inclusive hiring process, seven tips for a more welcoming process, and how you can hire internationally with ease. 

If you’re ready to level up and hire an innovative, multifaceted team, learning how to make hiring more inclusive is the first step. 

What is Inclusive Hiring, and Why Embrace It?

Inclusivity takes two major forms:

1. Promoting equity, fairness, and social justice
2. Rooting out and removing discrimination and unequal access to opportunities

Inclusive hiring integrates both of these aims to create a fair and equitable hiring process. 

Why be more inclusive at all? Your business can benefit from improved inclusivity in the following ways:

• Diverse applicants bring new ideas and cultural perspectives to your workplace, increasing your potential for success.

• In an increasingly inclusive world, creating a safe workplace for diverse employees can provide positive optics. 

• By centering inclusivity in the workplace, you can, in turn, increase customer accessibility to your products or services, potentially increasing your customer base.

7 Inclusive Hiring Tips

We’ve defined inclusive hiring and explored a few reasons why it might make sense for your brand. Let’s get into the nitty-gritty of hiring inclusively with seven tips for success.

#1 Create and publish an EEO statement

An Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) statement is a company’s written policy describing its fair hiring practices and prohibitions. EEO statements typically promote a few common goals, like:

• Prohibiting discrimination based on gender, sexual orientation, physical ability, class, race, or immigrant status

• Ensuring equal physical access to all company facilities for every employee, no matter their physical abilities

• Promoting a safe, welcoming workplace for people of all backgrounds

An EEO statement is, essentially, a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) document outlining how a business stays in compliance with local discrimination laws and maintains an equal opportunity workplace. 

But many EEO statements don’t venture beyond the boilerplate. While you should make sure that your policy meets local legal requirements, you can use the EEO composition process to brainstorm how you want your workplace to look, feel and operate. In addition to boilerplate text, consider including information like:

• How your company will take an active role in inclusivity instead of a passive one
• Your hiring and termination processes from start to finish
• Policies for reporting discrimination or misconduct
• Inclusivity benchmarks and long-term goals

EEO statements come in all shapes and sizes—creating and publishing one is an excellent way to jump-start your inclusive hiring overhaul. 

#2 Write inclusive job descriptions

Like EEO statements, job descriptions for employment ads are often boilerplate, templated documents that meet the bare minimum compliance requirements. How can you transform your job descriptions to attract diverse applicants?

• Focus on the role – Instead of listing applicant requirements, focus on the actual role the employee will take on. Provide a bulleted list of their duties and responsibilities, and consider ditching applicant requirements that discourage diverse inquiries. For instance, if an employee will perform most of their duties from their desk, consider eliminating the requirement that they must be able to lift 50 pounds from your ad. 

• Explain requirements – While you should do your best to focus on the role instead of applicant requirements, some prerequisites will be inevitable. For the requirements, you must list and describe why an applicant needs to meet them. If applicants must speak multiple languages, for instance, describe how multilingualism fits into their job description—elaborate, don’t just enumerate. 

• Integrate accessibility technologies – In the high-tech age, people with disabilities have more options for adaptive technologies—consider how easily these applicants can access your ad. For instance, computer users with visual impairment often rely upon audio recordings or braille translations to surf the web. Make sure your ad is compatible with these tools before posting. 

#3 Take a multilingual approach

As you revamp your hiring processes to be more inclusive, consider if—and how—multilingualism could fit into your business model. 

If your business hires internationally, you might already operate in multiple languages. If that’s the case, make sure that your company information and job ads are available in those languages. 

But if you’re currently operating in only one language, ask your global HR team the following questions:

• Could a non-native speaker or language learner succeed at the company? Which roles could be right for them?

• If you hired a non-fluent speaker, how could you ensure compliant and convenient communication with them? Will you hire a translator, provide language education to existing employees, or take a different approach?

• Would multilingualism help you expand your customer base or improve your customer service tools?

If multilingualism or hiring non-native speakers could work for your brand, make sure that your website, job ad, and publicly posted policies are available in multiple languages.

#4 Embrace remote working

Integrating remote working can open numerous doors for your inclusive hiring practices and your brand’s employee diversity. Considering the role of remote work at your company is part and parcel of learning how to make hiring more inclusive.

Let’s explore a few examples of how remote work can provide opportunities for diverse applicants:

• Hiring remote employees from other countries can attract worldwide applicants, who could bring a fresh perspective and innovative ideas to the table. 

• Stay-at-home parents looking for work can meet their childcare and career goals by taking a remote position.

• Applicants with disabilities or mobility issues can excel from the comfort of their home instead of navigating often-inaccessible public transit systems to commute to work.

• Blind or deaf applicants can use the accessibility tools they need at home without fear of disturbing other workers. 

• Applicants taking care of a sick relative or an elderly family member can work a traditional job without leaving their wards unsupervised.

Incorporating remote work can be a boon to inclusive hiring, but it’s usually beneficial for your company, too—you could reduce your overhead costs, integrate paperless payroll solutions and increase the return on investment for workplace technology.

#5 Provide accessibility details to applicants

Before posting a new job ad, consider how accessible your facilities are for people with disabilities. Create a document listing your facility’s accessibility details and include the document in your job postings. 

First, audit your facility. Document the number and location of:

• Stairs
• Doors
• Handicapped parking spots
• Restrooms
• Steps up and down into rooms, hallways, or closets
• Wheelchair ramps

Second, describe the technologies available to people with disabilities, like:

• Stair lifts
• Elevators
• Braille signs
• Handrails 
• Adaptive keyboards and other accessibility tools

Third, describe your long-term goals for improved accessibility. If there’s only one wheelchair-friendly restroom in your facility, for instance, consider setting (and documenting) a goal to add more.

Providing as many details as possible can help people with disabilities determine whether or not they could fill your open position—or even easily get into the building for an in-person interview. 

#6 Learn more about worldwide employment cultures

If you’re ready to go global, it’s time to brush up on your international knowledge. Having a baseline familiarity with a variety of cultures—especially their perception of work and workplace trends—can help you increase your applicant pool and access talent from around the world. 

If you plan on offering a position to a citizen of a different country, ask yourself the following questions to get an idea of a culture’s view of work:

• How are the labor laws in a country different from your homeland?
• Are people in the country generally excited to work? Are employees satisfied?
• Do people try to stay at one job for as long as possible, or transition frequently?
• Is the workforce made up of primarily women or men, or are all genders represented?
• Do children generally join the workforce? At what age?

#7 Use an international payroll solution

Let’s face it—building a remote workforce takes time, effort, and innovation. The challenge of building systems to accommodate international workers—and comply with worldwide labour laws—can sometimes keep companies from improving their hiring inclusivity. 

To overcome the hurdles of international hiring, consider using an international payroll management system like Playroll. We make worldwide hiring easier by:

• Managing payroll and wage reporting compliance for an employee’s home country
• Offering HR services in multiple languages
• Streamlining onboarding for new employees
• Integrating currency conversions
• Decreasing the cost of running an international HR department

Any international automated payroll services provider worth its salt will integrate seamlessly with your domestic and global teams, serving as an arm of—and supporting—your in-house HR department to tackle the numerous challenges of international hiring. 

Playroll: Hire the World’s Talent with Ease

An inclusive workforce is often a global one. If your company is growing and have a diversity hiring goal, creating inclusive hiring practices will increase your chances of building a diverse employee pool with valuable, multicultural perspectives. 

That said, international hiring can have its challenges. Fortunately, Playroll is here to help. 

We offer two excellent tools to turn your HR department into a global-friendly powerhouse—our payroll management platform and our team of international hiring and compliance experts. With the Playroll platform, you can plan your international growth, estimate costs, onboard employees, complete and monitor payroll functions and learn more about international cultures. It helps to take advantage of employer of record services in hiring foreign employees. 

The world is your oyster—Playroll is here to help you crack it open.