Diversity is more than just a buzzword for today’s business leaders.
Employing people of all ages, ethnicities, cultural backgrounds, genders, and sexual orientation is crucial for social justice, but it also has many valuable benefits for accounting teams.
Research from McKinsey shows a diverse workforce is good for the bottom line, as diverse teams are 35% more likely to experience higher financial returns.
Companies with greater diversity are also 70% more likely to capture the attention of more customers. Plus, investing in diversity for your hiring strategy can make you more appealing to finance talent, as today’s innovators search more consistently for empathic and respectful employers.
To ensure a high level of diversity in your accountancy team, you’ll need to create the right hiring and recruitment strategy. Here’s how you can get started.
1. Adjust Company Culture to Appeal to Diverse Candidates
The first step in attracting more diverse candidates to your accountancy team is auditing your existing culture and company policies.
Look at your existing workforce and consider how your current operations and processes might be roadblocks to welcoming new talent. For instance, could you offer hybrid working opportunities, remote working, or condensed workweeks to people with complex schedules?
Making your workplace more flexible ensures you can appeal to a wider range of accountancy clients.
It’s also worth looking at the steps you take to make everyone feel included and welcome in your team. Do you offer DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) training to team members and managers? How do you deal with any bias issues that may cause certain staff members to feel less accepted in your workforce?
2. Assess Your Employer Brand
After adjusting the policies and culture of your business to appeal to a wider range of accountancy candidates, you’ll need to make sure your employer brand is sending the right message. Start by looking at your website and the information you share online. How often do you highlight your employees and demonstrate your commitment to diversity in your content?
Look at the reviews left by your existing employees and previous team members on sites like Glassdoor, and determine if there are any issues which may make you seem less appealing to diverse candidates.
It’s also worth auditing your job ads. Sometimes, certain terms and phrases can make your jobs seem less applicable to certain groups of people. For instance, using the term “experienced veteran” for your accounting manager role could scare off younger candidates; yes, I have seen this job advert!
3. Use Blind Hiring Processes
Even if you consider your accountancy recruiting process to be relatively diverse, it’s easy for people to fall into the bad habits of unconscious bias. “Blind” hiring strategies can help to overcome these issues. For instance, you can use recruitment tools that black out the personal information on CVs, so you can’t make decisions based on a person’s name or age.
Blind interviews can use a very similar principle to blacking out CVs. They involve sending important questions to your candidates via text to help filter through potential employees. Once you’ve narrowed down your selection of candidates, you can begin to host more personal interviews, hopefully without bias.
Blind hiring practices significantly reduce the risk of external factors influencing your hiring decisions. Even if you only use these processes for part of the interview process, they can still help give you a wider range of candidates to choose from.
4. Fill Your Talent Pipeline Working With An Experienced Recruiter
The easiest way to develop a diverse hiring process is to work with a specialist recruitment team in the accountancy space to help fill your talent pipeline. These recruitment experts have connections to diverse groups of professionals from different backgrounds, so they can help ensure your shortlist of candidates is never biased.
A recruitment team can help you maintain a diverse approach to hiring when you’re bringing new staff members into your team to fill gaps. However, recruiters like Rebus are also excellent at helping companies to create more diverse pipelines for long-term strategies.
A good recruitment team will also provide you with guidance and advice on how you can make your recruitment process more diverse, based on their existing experiences in the field.
5. Don’t Ignore Feedback
Feedback can be an excellent tool for improving any hiring strategy. Even if you think you’re doing all the right things to promote a diverse workforce, there may still be issues preventing you from reaching certain candidates.
Speaking to the people you interview, including new employees, will be an excellent way to gather insights into what you need to improve. Provide opportunities for everyone you interact with to share their Feedback during the hiring process.
Anonymous surveys and review requests can be particularly useful for new employees who want to avoid upsetting their new manager.
Thanks,
Rachel
What’s Next?
Working with a specialist accountancy recruitment team is an excellent way to find a wider range of diverse and talented people to join your team.
With years of experience in the financial landscape, Rebus Recruitment can help you expand your pipeline and create more diverse hiring practices for your company.
Reach out to us today via email or 01282 930 930 to get started.
About Rebus Financial Recruitment
Rebus Financial Recruitment provides a specialist and focused recruitment service to its customers, ranging from various organisations, including SMEs, to large PLCs.
We strive to offer both the client and candidate a seamless recruitment experience. Using our expertise, we get to the heart of employer and employee needs, and, in doing so, we match the two perfectly.
To find out more, get in contact with one of our team today, or you can call us on 01282 930930.
