Diversity Recruiting Metrics and How to Measure Them

Diversity is becoming an increasingly important focus for many companies—as it should. 

A more diverse workforce allows organizations to represent their communities more effectively. It also helps companies like yours to become more resilient and flexible. To accomplish this, many businesses create a diversity Recruitment strategy to develop a more inclusive workforce.

But how are you supposed to measure the success of these initiatives? There are several ways you can track the diversity of your recruitment efforts. Keep reading to learn why diversity recruiting metrics are so important, the most effective ways to track recruitment diversity, and how to start monitoring your own diversity recruitment strategy. 

Diversity Metrics: What Are They and Why Do They Matter?

Diversity metrics are how organizations measure, track, and evaluate diversity and inclusion. They offer insights into the representation of various demographic groups, such as race, gender, age, and ethnicity, within a company.

Diversity metrics matter for several reasons. They help organizations understand the current state of diversity within their workforce and identify any disparities or underrepresented groups—this knowledge is essential for creating a more inclusive and equitable workplace.

Diversity metrics also enable organizations to set measurable goals and track progress over time. By establishing targets for improving diversity, organizations can hold themselves accountable and drive meaningful change.

By analyzing diversity metrics, organizations can assess the effectiveness of their diversity and inclusion initiatives and identify areas for improvement.

Why Measure Diversity in Recruitment?

Measuring the success of your diversity recruitment strategy is fundamental to meeting your goals. Without a way to measure the impact of your initiative, you have no way to know how well it’s actually working. You may struggle to meet your goals or waste time and effort on recruitment strategies that aren’t working.

Furthermore, the measurement process lets you spot whether you’re still leaving certain demographics behind in your recruitment efforts. When you track how your organization’s workforce changes over time, you’ll know where it’s most important to focus your attention going forward.

Measuring diversity is also an excellent way to improve your recruitment efforts. You can try multiple strategies and compare them to see which are most successful, then implement the best variation across your organization’s hiring efforts. By repeating this process using diversity recruiting metrics, you can build the most effective diversity recruitment strategy for your business.

DEI Metrics Examples: What To Analyze

Your company can look at several different things when it comes to how to measure diversity and inclusion in recruitment. Every organization will have different priorities when it comes to which DEI metrics to analyze, but here are some of the most broadly applicable.

Workforce composition

To begin with, what does your current workforce look like, and how does it compare to the applicant pool for each of their positions? Examine metrics related to race, gender, age, ethnicity, and other demographic factors to identify any underrepresented groups. 

If your workforce diversity metrics show that it’s less diverse than the group of applicants you had for each role, this might be evidence of bias in the recruitment process. It could be worth looking into recruiting software with Diversity And Inclusion hardwired in.

Additionally, examine how your workforce is allocated. If you have a certain demographic occupying most of the senior roles while another occupies most of the entry-level positions, this may be something to work on.

Sources of hire

When looking at your recruitment metrics, it’s often a good idea to start at the source. Where are your candidates coming from, and are you using sources that are skewed too heavily in one direction? Analyzing sources of hire metrics helps evaluate the effectiveness of your recruitment channels. 

By tracking these, organizations can identify potential biases and make informed decisions to diversify their talent pool.

Candidate experience

Paying close attention to the candidate experience during your hiring process is a good idea whether you’re measuring diversity or not. It’s obviously crucial to ensure that applicants’ experience with and perception of your company is positive, even if they were unsuccessful.

However, you can drill down into this further to use it as a measurable diversity metric. When gathering responses from candidates, sort them by demographic—this may reveal patterns i.e. one demographic might feel more negative about their experience than another. Act on this information, find out why this might be the case, and use it to improve your process.

Retention

Just like the candidate experience, retention is a vital metric to keep an eye on generally. No company wants a high churn rate, after all. But how does the retention rate vary between different groups of people? If the turnover rate for female employees is disproportionately high, for example, this could be an indicator that something needs to change. 

Analyze retention rates across different demographic groups to identify potential disparities and address any issues that may affect underrepresented employees’ tenure.

Pay equity

Examining pay equity metrics is crucial to ensure fair compensation practices. Assess whether there are any gender, racial, or ethnic pay gaps within your organization. Identifying and addressing these gaps promotes equal opportunities and helps foster a more inclusive workplace.

Employee sentiment

Nobody knows your company better than the people working for it, and getting your information straight from the horse’s mouth is never a bad idea. 

Employee sentiment metrics capture the experiences and perceptions of employees regarding diversity and inclusion. Conduct surveys or analyze data from employee feedback platforms to gauge employees’ sense of belonging, inclusion, and opportunities for growth. This data highlights areas of improvement and helps measure the impact of diversity and inclusion initiatives.

How to Measure Diversity: Assessing Your Recruitment Strategy

So, how are you supposed to actually track your overall diversity in recruitment? There are two main techniques available. You may either analyze your organization’s diversity and that of new recruits based on demographic information, or you may compare your company’s diversity against benchmarks set by similar organizations. Here’s how each strategy works.

Analyse Data Based on Demographics

The first way to track whether diverse recruitment is working is by comparing your internal demographics to those of the communities from which you recruit. For example, if you primarily hire from one city, you track internal diversity compared to that of that city. 

Suppose you’re located in London. If you’ve truly removed bias from your hiring process, the people you’re recruiting should more or less reflect the same demographics as London’s Population As A Whole. This includes a roughly equal gender balance and at least 40% minority candidates. 

You can also apply this to your organization as a whole instead of just your new recruits. This can help you bring your company’s diversity higher by highlighting which demographics are underrepresented in your workforce. For instance, you can measure diversity for your overall organization to learn whether you need to prioritize women in your recruitment to achieve true parity.

Benchmark Data Against Other Organisations

The alternative is to compare your company’s diversity to that of similar organizations. This can be a more effective solution for large enterprises or industries where there’s a noted lack of specific demographics. For instance, many industries suffer from a lack of female candidates due to societal biases that cause women to avoid pursuing the necessary education. 

Consider a field like accounting. Women only became 49% of the Student Accountant Population in 2017. This means that many accounting firms struggle to achieve gender parity in their more senior roles. In this case, comparing your organization’s diversity compared to the population as a whole will make it significantly harder to reach your goals.

However, comparing yourself to benchmarks set by other accounting firms would allow you to monitor your diversity in the context of your industry. If you meet or exceed the benchmarks of other firms in your industry, you can trust that your diversity initiatives are working. 

How Oleeo Can Help You Monitor Diversity

Whether you choose to monitor diversity against general population demographics or by comparing your business against other organizations’ benchmarks, there’s one unavoidable requirement. You need to work with a system that will help you track your diversity data, compare it with your chosen benchmarks, and analyze it to find opportunities for improvement. 

That’s where Oleeo can help. Oleeo’s Applicant Tracking System is directly tied to Oleeo Insights, its in-depth recruitment report software. This tool allows you to securely track critical information about every candidate and produce reports that show how your diversity efforts are performing. 

Oleeo’s built-in diversity analytics tools can help you break down your numbers to the location, recruiter, and hiring manager involved, so you can spot problem areas or highlight success stories. You can choose to work with pre-built reports or build your own to focus on the diverse details you care about the most. 

Oleeo has already been proven to help organizations improve their diversity. For instance, the British Transport Police (BTP) worked with Oleeo to hire a more inclusive and diverse workforce. The BTP needed to fill 550 vacancies annually and struggled to appeal to minority candidates. 

Since implementing the Oleeo Recruiting Enablement Platform for Police, though, the BTP has significantly improved its diversity metrics. Oleeo helped the BTP: 

• Double the number of minority applicants
• Use government positive action provisions more effectively
• Support its ability to maintain talent pool applications
• Improve the overall application process for candidates
• Fill more than 1,100 roles

Today, more than 60% of all police forces in England and Wales rely on Oleeo to hire diverse officers and ensure that these forces reflect the communities in which they patrol.

Prioritize Diversity in Recruitment With Oleeo

A more diverse workforce is better for your employees, your community, and your organization. To ensure your diversity recruiting strategy is effective, you should monitor the actual demographic information of your new recruits. Oleeo makes it easy to track your organization’s diversity and produce in-depth, comprehensive recruitment reports on your recruiting efforts using diversity and inclusion metrics.

You can learn more about Oleeo’s diversity recruiting platforms today. Get in touch to Book A Demo or sign up to work with Oleeo today.