To ensure you are reaching the widest applicant pool of all genders, investing in inclusive language tools, like pronouns and gender neutral language, for job descriptions and job postings is key. Maintaining an ongoing effort to identify any barriers and language that might create candidate fallout, particularly for gender, non-binary, and people of color helps organizations with talent acquisition as well as retention.

Another non-traditional approach to find candidates is to market digital out-of-home ads, like at bus stops and in subway stations, to reach people who may or may not be actively seeking jobs as they view screens on their daily commute. Identifying these passive candidates is an opportunity to nearly double the candidate pool. Recruiters should also proactively build a heat map of candidates for professional roles. While these candidates may be employed currently, keeping them in the purview to become an active candidate for the right role can help with opportunistic hiring. Many recruiters find that calling candidates to establish a rapport provides a competitive edge over just sending the traditional emails and LinkedIn DM’s.

To increase candidate flow, employers can also encourage employees to refer candidates offering monetary bonuses and in some cases, even doubling the amount for hard-to-fill roles.

Increasing the team who helps you look for talent can also improve sourcing efforts. Outside of HR, adding a structured interview approach to include diverse employee hiring panels that reflect a company’s demographics will help find talent through a fair and equitable recruiting process. Adding to the scope of race, age, gender, LGBTQIA+, and other dimensions of diversity, ensuring that business groups, career levels, members of employee resource groups and employee tenure is important and should be represented on hiring panels. A University of Colorado at Boulder study has shown that when half a candidate pool is non-white or female, the hiring committee has a 50-50 chance of choosing one of those applicants. When only one person in the finalist pool is non-white or female, that person is never chosen.

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