Storytelling Tips For Recruiters To Hire Diversity Candidates

Storytelling is an essential component in recruitment, especially while recruiting diversity candidates. It is an art that recruiters these days fail to master. In fact, many recruiters lack the skill of hiring diversity candidates as they equate them with other potential male job applicants. This very deficit in storytelling is the sole reason why recruiters shy away from engaging with diversity candidates.

In this day and age, corporates look forward to making their workspace more inclusive and sensitive by hiring women employees in teams and at leadership levels. Although diversity hiring is a trend in the recruitment world, several recruiters find it a challenge to source female candidates due to their inability to sell the brand, product or service.

According to a study published in the media, women employees seek to excel to the top, but they don’t want to give up every other components of their lives to do it.  They tend to strike a balance between work and family. Women employees also seek other corporate benefits likes perks, leaves and other additional benefits such as transportation, expressive work culture and food rather than salary. Experts have arrived at a consensus that women candidates are livelier when compared to men. They consider work space an extension of their social circle and highly price the importance of communication at work.

Thus, in order to attract diversity candidates, an organisation must put in vigorous efforts to enhance and modify their workspaces and include additional benefits.

Han Digital works closely with top IT companies to attract diversity candidates. We work with leadership teams in devising strategies, market insights and recruitment storytelling. Over the last 10 years, we have helped hire over 50 women leaders for our clients.

What we have understood from our experience is attracting diversity candidates begins with effective storytelling. It is not just about roles and responsibilities. It is neither about salaries nor job titles. It is about is understanding the diversity candidate requirements, empathizing with their problems and their candidature in a genuine manner.

However, it is not enough for only organisations to put in efforts in framing policies benefiting diversity candidates. Recruiters must proactively volunteer to make diversity hiring an easy task by learning the art of storytelling.

Here are a few tips that will guide recruiters to convey a valuable story while hiring diversity candidates:

Always be well-informed

Diversity hiring is a complex task as recruiters are required to invest tremendous amount of time into learning the very nature of this hiring module. Diversity hiring involves a lot of convincing and a recruiter should be open to learning new concepts about the product or service while speaking to diversity candidates.

Speak about perks and benefits

A recruiter must always begin with the benefits the candidate is going to procure while being an employee of the firm. According to experts in the industry, a candidate is more inclined towards benefits rather than remuneration. For instance, while hiring female candidates, a recruiter must always give them safety assurances, transportation perks and tips on grievance redressal policies.

Learn the art of conveying information

Although storytelling is a complex art that requires practice to master. A recruiter must learn this art no matter what. Often the best talent reject job offers due to the lack of communication and storytelling tactics that recruiters employ while conveying a job information. Candidates seek to know more about the company, the vision, mission and a detailed understanding of the company’s product or service.

To master the technique of storytelling, a recruiter should first:

• Thoroughly understand the job description
• Clarify doubts if any
• Simplify job description for employees
• Highlight attractive points about the job
• Give several examples and case studies to make candidate understand

Similarly, a recruiter must never make the job sound like an advertisement instead a valuable opportunity.

Offer assurances

Confidence and reliability are two sides of the same coin. Instilling confidence and trust about the company to the best talent should be a prime concern for ace recruiters. Assuring diversity candidates about the policies, financial stability and management can help recruiters to convince them in a jiffy. It is the duty of a recruiter to offer background information about the company and other additional details before employment.

Storytelling is not about conning a candidate on the basis of untrue information that can drastically affect the brand image of the company, instead it more about being genuine and the ability to respect candidates.

Diversity hiring is a unique mix of trends, understanding and perseverance. The industry lacks this competence due to its very complex and volatile nature. However, no job is easy unless one puts in the effort to seamlessly tackle it. Similarly, diversity hiring offers a wonderful opportunity for recruiters to expand their expertise and learn newer modules of recruitment.