How do you know that your job ads are inclusive?
Representing how inclusive your organization is, requires a conscious and consistent focus on creating inclusive job ads that are safe, suitable, relevant and authentic to your brand. With almost every person in your organization creating content that combines to communicate your brand story, you need to pay particular attention to evaluate if the story truly reflects your commitment to diversity in the workplace.
A recent report by Glassdoor found that over 76% of job seekers actively seek out employers with cultures that focus on workplace diversity. If diversity is the result, companies need to focus on inclusion as the goal –thus flipping the focus to actual behaviors (Josh Bersin). Inclusive behavior is reflected in the internal and external communications of an organization and represents their values.
Most of the time, Job ads are the first touch points for people into a company. Hence organizations need to create Job ads that represents the diverse talent they seek to attract.
How do companies create inclusive Job ads?
In-order to create inclusive Job ads, companies deploy a combination of three things described below::
Defining standards and templates
Standards – creating inclusive style guides.
Use of templates that highlights inclusive benefits, accommodations, EEO and fair hiring practices.
Checklists – for language to avoid, language to include, do’s and don’ts.
Processes for training, audit and review of Job ads, and
Adoption of inclusive language assistant technologies that guides the users in creating job posts.
We found the following three posts very informative and instructive on how companies can create inclusive Job ads:
How to write inclusive Job ads – By Lever
3 simple rules of using inclusive language in your job ads – by Breezy, and
5 Must-Do’s for writing inclusive Job ads – by Maxwell Huppert from Zoro.com
How do you know if your Job ads are inclusive?
Once you put in the right standards, processes and deploy tools to help create Job ads, you want to know if your Job ads are truly inclusive?
Simply put, your Job ads are inclusive if it fulfills the following three criteria:
1) Job ads should not contain any bias or irrelevant references.
1a) Eliminate Gender, Race, Age, Ableism, Ethnicity, Religion, Elitism coded language. Example:
1b) If you are using images / video, then ensure they are representative of the context of the job posts and values of the organization Example: Advertising your job post along with image below may not provide you with the best possible outcomes from a DEI perspective.
2) Job ads contains safe, suitable, relevant and authentic references.
2a) Contains EEO, Inclusive hiring practices, inclusive benefits and accommodations statements.
2b) Contains brand values that promote inclusivity and belonging.
2c) All references and images used for the job ad are suitable, relevant and inclusive of the context.
Example: The image below depicts appropriate representation of people in the context of the geography / location of the job posts.
3) The job ads creates the desired impact on hiring, retention and reference-ability outcomes, such as
3a) Decrease in time to fill candidates.
3b) Decrease in cost to fill.
3c) Diversity of the applicant pool.
3d) Growth in referrals
krita.ai framework for creating inclusive Job ads
krita.ai is an AI assistant for inclusive brand communications. Using our AI assistant, companies can create inclusive job postings, candidate communications, employee communications, messaging, product descriptions, marketing and collaboration content.
We have processed millions of text, images and videos to identify and measure the impact of inclusive communications across the enterprise. Working with these data has provided us with unique insights, that we structured into a simple framework that organizations can use to promote inclusive representation in their communications.
This framework can be applied to all communications including Job ads:
Audit to understand the facts of today: This involves analyzing your past Job ads for inclusive representation and creation of a baseline. The key outcomes include:
Identifying patterns of biases in Job ads that need to be fixed.
Identifying demographic representation and mis-representation in Job ads and finding opportunities to fix.
Benchmark against industry and peers.
Analyze data and performance of the Job ads to understand their impact and what worked / did not work.
Build inclusive content and publish it in an inclusive content.
Use of technology to help create inclusive job posts with real-time language assistance and data driven recommendations.
Get guidance of the destination where the job postings are published and if that destination is inclusive & representative of the brand.
Check to create a sustainable momentum. Track the performance of Job ads that feeds forward to more inclusive and high impact Job ads of the company. These metrics include:
Pipeline metrics and the diverse representation within the applicant pool.
Trends – of time to fill, cost to fill and diverse representation.
Sentiment analysis – from candidate communications, referrals and reviews.
Anecdotal evidence -based on candidate feedback.
Reach out to us to audit, build and check your Job ads for inclusive representation by sending an email to kesavan@krita.ai.
Our inclusive language guide for Job ads is available on Lever and SmashflyX platforms.
Additional Reading material
1) Decoding bias coded words in job descriptions
2) AI Based bias detectors, does my organization really need them?
About Krita.ai
krita.ai is an AI assistant for inclusive brand communications. We bring the power of our advanced language insights, image and video analysis to create communications that are free of bias and represent the diversity of the target audience. Our app is available on most popular enterprise platforms like Lever, Slack, MSTeams and SmashflyX. For more information, visit https://krita.ai