5 tips to run inclusive recruitment campaigns for your business

Inclusive recruiting should be at the forefront of your overall recruitment strategy in 2022 and beyond, for a number of essential reasons. To build a powerful employer brand and access a large pool of talented individuals, then you need to focus on building diversity and inclusivity in your recruitment campaigns.   

Of course, this doesn’t just mean inclusivity in recruitment because in the long run, you also want to weave this concept into your brand identity, values, mission, vision, and workplace. When you’re creating a new recruitment campaign to boost your employer branding, however, you need to implement some key inclusive recruitment practices. These will ensure you get the top talent to reach out and apply.

Here’s what they are and what you can do to welcome the best of the best into your brand.

Use the right RMS

Recruitment management software, or RMS for short, is an important piece of tech every HR department should use to organize the recruiting process as a whole. Most importantly, using an RMS means that HR experts, recruiters, and everyone on the vertical chain of command can have a detailed overview of the recruiting process.

This also means that you need to do some testing first and choose the right RMS, focusing on the ability to generate reports quickly, ensure effective talent management and automate key processes. This will prove invaluable for your inclusive recruiting efforts, as you will be able to utilize the candidate data to eliminate stereotypes and accidental bias from the recruiting process.

Common unconscious biases, prejudices and stereotypes can be based on characteristics such as:

• Race
• Ethnicity
• Gender
• Religion
• Sexual orientation
• Socioeconomic background
• Educational background

To avoid these biases, you need to:

• Conduct employee training and education
• Issue and disseminate clear anti-bias policies in the workplace
• Ensure compliance with these policies through supervision
• Use an RMS system that will collect and collate data for you to avoid accidental bias
• Create a diverse and inclusive hiring team

After that, your HR experts and managers should have a unified HRS (human resources software) to boost the onboarding process for all new hires. We’ll talk about onboarding and human resources software a little later, but let’s stick to inclusive recruiting practices for now.

Relevant reading: Hiring a diverse team remotely

Create an inclusive social recruiting campaign

Social recruiting is very popular nowadays, and this is your opportunity to showcase your brand in the best possible light. While you can run a recruiting campaign on any platform, keep in mind that LinkedIn is still the go-to source for job postings and professional growth.

With that in mind, make sure you are creating job postings that target a diverse audience. Some of the LinkedIn automation tools can also help you schedule posts and publish new job opportunities at the right time, and give you detailed post analytics so that you can optimize quickly. 

Nevertheless, make sure to disseminate your job postings on Facebook, Instagram, and other relevant social platforms to expand your brand’s reach. Keep in mind that job advertising on social media enables precise audience targeting, allowing you to reach potential employees locally, globally, and from diverse backgrounds.

A great example of a social recruitment campaign that attracted the right people from all walks of life is Home Depot’s campaign. Their key focus was on sharing their company values, which resonated with their ideal job applicants and created a welcoming environment for all.

Nail your video recruiting process

Last year, A|X Armani Exchange attempted to attract a diverse candidate pool of potential staffers for the new store in Milan, Italy. Their new marketing campaign focused on inclusivity through its impactful visuals and the signature “I Need You” tagline, both of which dared to speak to a broader, multicultural talent pool.

Now, what you can learn from the Armani Exchange example is that good visuals can be instrumental in recruitment campaigns, including video campaigns. However, when you move on to conducting interviews, you also need to create an inclusive experience for your candidates every step of the way.

After all, it’s not just about how you present your brand, but how inclusive your interviews actually are. Every engaging and professional job description that people will click on will focus on inclusivity and using the appropriate wording.

You have to make sure that you’re avoiding the words that are opposite of “inclusive” and that your recruiters and decision-makers are providing equal opportunities to all candidates. 

You can do this by:

• Focusing on inclusivity and detailed job requirements in the job description
• Defining your ideal candidate with detailed specifications
• Optimizing your recruitment ads and specify that you’re an equal opportunity employer
• Using appropriate imagery showing a diverse collective
• Providing equal-opportunity application forms, but keep specific demographics in mind, such as applicants with visual or hearing impairments
• Letting your RMS system choose the best applicants, and letting data influence your decision-making process

This will help the candidates feel welcome in your video interviews and help you take some of the stress out of video recruiting. 

Elevate your campaign with a professional voice-over

Video campaigns are a powerful recruitment tool in the digital world, as you can use your recruitment videos across different online platforms to generate engagement, visibility, and attract candidates. Complemented by a professionally written job description and beautiful recruiting landing pages, videos can help you incentivize and inspire people to apply.

When you’re creating recruitment videos, you have to make sure that the audio and the voice-over are on point. Keep in mind that an incredible commercial voice-over can amplify any inclusive recruitment campaign, especially if you have a winning script that uses the right language and is able to portray your brand’s values.

The key here is to research talented voice-over artists and choose someone who resonates with your brand and its values. Likewise, you want to choose the perfect format for your videos, going with elaborate explainer videos or choosing short reel-type videos to inspire people to act quickly.

The best thing you can do, of course, is to create various video formats that you can repurpose for different online platforms. You want your voice to be heard across the web and to reach a diverse audience.

Run an inclusive email recruitment campaign

Inclusive recruitment can happen via numerous online and offline channels. It should go without saying that good recruiters will think outside the box and create an omni-channel strategy. One of the channels that effective recruiters can leverage is email communication to engage potential candidates in one-on-one conversation. 

This kind of personalized communication helps inspire the best candidates to apply. To enable personalized communication, make sure to:

• Adapt communication according to the seniority level and the job in question.
• Use your brand’s tone of voice and weave your personality into the communication.
• Research every candidate, take a look at their LinkedIn profiles, and try to gauge their personal brand.
• Make small changes to your automated emails that matter. Aside from addressing them by their name, highlight something in their application that caught your eye.
• Take an interest in the individual during the interview process that goes beyond your company’s needs. Get to know the person in order to communicate efficiently and effectively.

Inclusivity is also present in companies that specialize in email solutions. A great example here would be Mailbird, a fully remote company that has developed an email client for Windows (with Mac on the way) that is comprised of 15 different nationalities. As a business built on diversity and inclusivity, they know that other growth-oriented brands need a solution that will make inclusive recruitment more efficient and effective.

With that in mind, it’s important to use a feature-rich email platform so that you can personalize your communication according to the unique needs of the individual, and improve deliverability, candidate management, and more. 

Create an inclusive onboarding process

Your recruiters have done their job and the decision makers have brought new people into the company - so what now? You might think that the most complex part is over, but in reality good inclusive recruitment depends on good onboarding. In other words, you need to make sure that you optimize your onboarding process to make all your recruiting efforts worth it. 

We’re not going to leave you without a few onboarding tips, of course, so the first thing you need to do is to make a checklist. For inclusive onboarding, you need to have a remote onboarding checklist that you can optimize and adapt for the individual and their unique workplace needs.

In this checklist, you want to:

• Set clear goals, KPIs, and expectations for every role
• Create a welcome package for new employees
• Provide detailed orientation with an FAQ section
• Provide all documentation in digital form
• Create an introduction email with all the important links
• Book meetings with training staff and management if necessary
• Create a week one itinerary and a three-month plan for the position
• Plan meet-ups with other team members
• Schedule regular check-in meetings
• Encourage feedback and use it to personalize the onboarding process

Make sure to have a special onboarding checklist for people with disabilities and optimize the onboarding steps for people from different ethnic, racial, and religious groups. You want your company to empower a diverse employee collective, which you cultivate over time and through your onboarding process.

Relevant reading: How to embrace and support neurodiversity in the workplace

To create a positive onboarding experience for people of different ethnicities, for example, make sure to:

• Do your research and educate yourself on the cultural background of every ethnicity
• Do not try to mirror the vocabulary or demeanor of any cultural or ethnical background other than your own
• Respect the right of the employee to express their ethnic and cultural heritage at work
• Embrace feedback immediately in order to quickly adapt the onboarding process
• Create a welcoming environment for all new hires through transparency, open communication, and the willingness to accommodate their needs

According to a report on the state of high-performing teams in tech, women of color are the least likely to speak in internal meetings, so creating a welcoming and inclusive environment for this employee demographic is a worthwhile investment.

Together with inclusive recruitment practices, inclusive onboarding will ensure your new hires become productive team members quickly. And finally, always remember that inclusive onboarding requires that you educate your existing staff and help them create a welcoming environment for all.

Over to you

Inclusive recruitment should be one of your top priorities when searching for new talent and trying to elevate your employer brand. Make sure to leverage these tips and tactics, and draw inspiration from some of the examples we mentioned today in order to implement your own inclusive recruitment practices in 2022.