The path towards a more diverse workforce starts with understanding how to measure diversity, equity, and inclusion.

For some, this means assessing their current hiring practices to root out unconscious biases. For others, this means including new targets for advancing diverse employees to higher positions of leadership.

What is the goal of diversity and inclusion?

The goal of diversity and inclusion initiatives is to create a workplace that accepts, supports, and values employees from all different backgrounds.

Not just different ethnicities, genders, ages, religions, disabilities, and sexual orientations, but also skill sets, experiences, and differences in education.

Diversity and inclusion policies aren’t just good for your employees’ wellbeing; it’s good for business, too.

Overall, diverse and inclusive companies perform better than their homogeneous counterparts in everything from innovation and profit to employee retention, talent recruitment, and other areas of business that contribute to value creation and long-term growth.

Here are some diversity recruiting metrics that can help your team begin tracking diversity and assess whether there are unconscious biases.

• Candidate demographics: The percentage of employees from specific identity groups (e.g., LGBTQIA) to the labour market or industry benchmarks.
• Candidate outreach: Are your employer branding efforts reaching candidates from diverse groups? Keep track of the ways in which recruiters are making contact with organisations designed to help underrepresented groups get hired.
• Candidate advancement: How many applicants from target groups apply to open positions compared to the size of the group in the overall labour market? How many applicants from target groups successfully make it to each stage of the hiring process compared to all candidates?
• Candidate selection: How many individuals from target groups are hired as compared to members from dominant groups?

How to measure inclusion

Inclusion tells you about the culture that empowers your workforce to be successful.

Inclusivity is manifested in the policies and procedures that your company creates to make everyone in the workplace feel valued.

To measure inclusion, start by asking your employees these two questions:

1. Do you feel you have an equal opportunity to succeed here and reach your full potential?
2. How have you observed and/or experienced bias, discrimination, and inequity?

Look at key indicators such as:

• DE&I Statement: Does your company have a DE&I statement? Do your employees know what it is? Do they feel the statement is more than just a marketing exercise?
• Employee Resource Groups: Are mentorship programs and Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) available to diverse employees?
• Advancement: Track the number of promotions awarded to individuals in special identity groups compared with individuals from other groups — are promotion rates similar or proportional?
• Pay equity: Are you offering equal pay for equal work? Are you transparent about pay levels and pay scale?
• Employee benefits: Are your benefits packages equitable and considerate of needs of employees from all different backgrounds?
• Employee retention: What is your diverse employees’ tenure compared to your employees from a dominant identity group?

By answering these questions, you can begin to build a culture that’s welcoming to employees of all backgrounds.

Tools to track your diversity effort

A diversity recruiting dashboard is one way to hold your organisation accountable for these key metrics.

This dashboard does not need to be complicated: Buffer, for instance, uses a simple landing page of charts showing progress in hiring target groups such as military veterans, employees with disabilities, non-native English speakers, and family status.

This diversity recruiting dashboard serves both as an easy way to keep track of hiring goals as well as to be transparent on issues such as gender diversity and ethnic diversity.

Buffer’s dashboard also provides an option to view by role type — filter by leadership, technical, and non-technical roles.

Can there be such a thing as too much diversity?

“Too much” diversity isn’t really an issue — organisations are more likely to be accused of diversity issues such as reverse discrimination or tokenism.

To avoid reverse discrimination, hiring targets should be set to remedy a protected group’s past barriers to opportunity. For instance, prioritising a minority group for advancement to the managerial level is a legal diversity goal.

Tokenism is a potential pitfall that results from increasing diversity without improving inclusivity.

Tokenism is when individuals from underrepresented communities are hired or promoted, but not given the same influence or treated with the same respect as their majority counterparts.

To capture the full benefit of diversity, organisations need to invest in creating an inclusive culture.

The perception that there can be “too much diversity” likely comes from a lack of inclusivity.

Adding diverse perspectives can lead to tension and conflict — unless an organisation is prepared with the right tools, inclusive environment, and mindset.

How to increase diversity

• Expand your candidate pipeline
• Improve your job descriptions
• Use a skills test
• Make interviewing more inclusive
• Update your employer branding

Despite these clear steps that can lead to better diversity, many organisations struggle to achieve diversity targets.

There are many reasons why this is — but before investing in diversity hiring, make sure your company has the right infrastructure and leadership commitment to make these initiatives successful.

How to set diversity hiring goals

Quantitative measures of diversity hiring start with a baseline. Try an assessment like Hubspot’s worksheet designed to help you keep track of hiring metrics to see where your diversity hiring could be improved.

The next step is to get buy-in from your leadership team. Too often, diversity is seen as an “HR problem.”

Present your diversity hiring goals, as well as the findings of your baseline survey, to build a business case for setting the bar higher.

With buy-in from your senior leaders, you can then proceed to systematically improve diversity, equity, and inclusion at your company.

This article first appeared in Vervoe. At Vervoe, their mission is to fundamentally transform the hiring process from mediocrity to meritocracy.