The benefits of hiring for diversity

End-consumers are diverse. Diversity comes in the form of people’s skin colours, gender, sexual orientation, disabilities, and more. As your team determines how to market and create products for target demographics, it’s essential to have a diverse group to understand the needs of your end consumers.

According to a study by the Harvard Business Review, a team with members who share a client’s ethnicity is 152% more likely to understand a client. Other studies cite that people of diverse backgrounds can view information from various perspectives to bring different opinions to a project. 

These diverse teams ultimately lead to faster and better decisions. Cloverpop found diverse teams made faster decisions and benefited from a 60% improvement in decision making.

While statistics say a lot, this article explains what “hiring for diversity” means. It then emphasizes specific reasons for how hiring for diversity can benefit your organization. 

What does “hiring for diversity” mean? 

When we think of hiring for diversity, it’s common to think about ethnicity and gender. You’re trying to create a team or leadership board representing different backgrounds, colours, and socioeconomic classes. 

Overall, hiring for diversity is hiring people with different characteristics. This goes beyond race and sex. It also means different educational backgrounds, values, locations, personalities, and abilities. 

Diversity could mean hiring a mathematician for your marketing team or an artist for your sales department. These people can bring unique attributes to an organization or department and generate value you may not have believed was available. 

Get different perspectives on ideas

Businesses sometimes come out with ad campaigns that cause a lot of controversy. You might wonder how in the world something like that got approved! Often, the team behind it lacked diversity, which blinded them to the critical flaws in their ideas. 

Creating teams with people who come from various life experiences allows a company to see infant ideas from a variety of outlooks. Someone who grew up in a different culture might immediately spot issues with a plan that others don’t. This ultimately saves teams significant time — instead of working on an idea for weeks only to discover problems later, a team can find and eliminate issues from the get-go. 

Widen your candidate pool and attract talent

No company purposely excludes talent from different ethnicities or disabilities because doing so is generally illegal. But diversity can also include hiring individuals from other countries or with different educational backgrounds. 

Diversity for your team might include hiring a remote member from the other side of Canada or the world. Being open to this can significantly widen your talent pool many times over.

Additionally, we see more companies forego university degree requirements. This is a popular trend as businesses realize that a bachelor’s degree is too common and often irrelevant. Self-taught computer programmers are commonly as good or maybe better than programmers with a degree! 

When applicants see that your current workplace is diverse, it might encourage them to consider your company as their number one choice. Ultimately, job applicants want to work where they feel they’ll fit in. If they see your company and there’s no one that looks like them, it might make your organization seem less friendly or open to diverse applicants. 

Better understand your end-consumer

North America is a diverse place. So, as a business, you’re often catering to a diverse set of end consumers. Without the proper diversity in your team, you may miss out on untapped opportunities. You might also make moves that don’t resonate or even offend communities that are critical to your consumer base. 

Experts and numbers aren’t always correct. You can do numerous studies and create charts and diagrams. But even then, get something wrong. That’s why hiring someone who shares characteristics with your diverse target demographic is a sure method to getting it right. 

Hiring for diversity is more than just about race and gender. It means finding people with different characteristics and values from your current team members. This can ultimately strengthen your development and marketing initiatives and reduce issues in your business process.

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