9 ways to improve your diversity recruitment strategy
WHAT DEFINES A GOOD LEADER? LOOK FOR THESE SIX QUALITIES
Modern business challenges can require new approaches. Leadership will need to evolve in order to continue to guide organisations in tomorrow's world of work. But what are the characteristics of a good modern leader in the workplace - and how can organisations develop them?
Many studies draw parallels between effective leadership and solid organisational performance. But whether they’re a junior manager or a senior executive, the qualities that leaders need are changing.
Nearly 1,500 HR professionals ranked leadership development as the number one priority for 2025, with managers feeling 'overwhelemed' by the expansion of their responsibilities. In today’s unpredictable world, you must combine traditional leadership skills with new abilities. So, what does an effective modern leader look like?
1. Remember what makes a good leader
Before looking at the new skills future leaders may need, it is worth reflecting on what a leader actually is.
What are the qualities of a good leader? It’s not what you may think.
Being in charge of colleagues does not necessarily make you a ‘leader’. Former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg explains: “Leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that impact lasts in your absence.”
Retired astronaut Chris Hadfield believes that good leadership is: “Not about glorious crowning acts. It’s about keeping your team focused on a goal and motivated to do their best to achieve it. Especially when the stakes are high and the consequences really matter.”
There may be varying opinions on the strengths and weaknesses of leaders. But overall, most people believe that great leaders motivate their team members to perform their best and achieve common goals.
What traits do you need to achieve this in the modern workplace?
2. Use blended leadership styles for a VUCA world
Stacey Philpot from Deloitte Consulting maintains that the core skills needed historically in leadership roles have remained unchanged.
“These skills allow someone to become a leader faster than their peers. This is even true in today’s volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) environment,” she says.
The core skills for leading in a VUCA environment include:
- Pattern recognition
- Motivation
- Agility
- Emotional intelligence
- Ability to understand, control and express emotions
This represents psychological assessments of 23,000 senior leaders globally over the past 25 years.
Consider introducing servant leadership:
Leaders need new styles of leadership to deal with changing cultures. Being comfortable with not having the answer and owning failure can create an environment of trust and openness.
Collectively, these behaviours form ‘servant leadership’. The Chartered Management Institute (CMI) defines servant leadership as emphasising behaviours and values such as:
- Active listening
- Empathy
- Leading by example
These are instead of opting for a more authoritative, ‘command-and-control’ leadership style. Leaders create the conditions for team members to excel by displaying vulnerability. But given the stigma around servant leadership, how can organisations encourage it?
How to combat stigma surrounding servant leadership:
Alsu Polyakova, HR Leader for GE Healthcare, says reducing stigma around servant leadership will take a specific strategy. Most importantly frequent performance appraisals for leaders.
“We give leaders lots of opportunities for self-reflection, so they understand how they behave,” she says. GE Healthcare’s most successful leaders help to encourage behavioural change, Polyakova says. The company measures success by how well employees rate leaders on achieving GE Healthcare’s ‘cultural pillars’. These pillars include inspiring trust and empowering employees.
3. Create a culture of trust in the workplace
Gaining workers’ trust is more important than ever. One way to build trust is for leaders to take action on issues such as climate change. 71 percent of employees consider their CEOs’ social awareness as critically important, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer.
Social awareness may yield rich rewards. The Edelman poll shows that workers who trust their employers are far more engaged and remain more loyal than their more sceptical peers.
Leadership styles are clearly changing. The most effective leaders will need to tailor their styles to suit different scenarios, says Professor Sattar Bawany. “Leaders need a broad repertoire of management styles and the wisdom to know when each style should be used,” he says. “In crisis scenarios like cybersecurity breaches, for example, leadership should be authoritarian because the scenario is unstructured.”
4. Adapt your leadership style for different generations
Managers must also balance leadership styles to suit different generations. Modern workplaces will soon house up to five generations under one roof. Therefore, there will be many people with differing preferences on leadership style.
As of 2023, millennials are the biggest group in the UK workforce, at 35 percent. Modern leaders must mix old and new leadership styles that meet the needs of younger generations. Doing so will future proof organisations. However, new leadership approaches cannot come at the expense of alienating older workers.
5. Commit to lifelong learning
With the workplace evolving so rapidly, leaders cannot rely on past experience alone to get by. Ben Farmer, Head of HR at Amazon UK agrees: “Experience is not always synonymous with wisdom and judgement. And naivety doesn’t always engender novel thinking and openness to change.”
Organisations should look for leaders who understand the future as well as those with experience. “Success comes from the ability to combine understanding of exciting, new trends with the experience required to put that knowledge into action,” says Farmer.
But what is the right balance? There is no one-size-fits-all approach when balancing experience with adaptability. Achieving the right balance will mostly depend on the organisation and the sector it operates in.
6. Be conscious of culture
Organisational culture is an important factor. Risk-averse firms may prefer experience over novel thinking. Leaders may be fearful of a backlash from stakeholders should novel thinking fail. To lower risk, companies should seek leaders who use both scientific evidence and intuition when making decisions.
Ultimately, there’s no single blueprint for an effective modern leader. Each organisation must tailor their approach to leadership development. There must be a focus on organisational culture, industry nuances and employee mix.
But above all, leaders should recognise that today’s reality may be old news tomorrow.
For more expert advice, take a look at the following articles:
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9 WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR DIVERSITY RECRUITMENT STRATEGY
Diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) in the workplace is a hot topic today. In fact, many jobseekers are actively looking for employers who value these principles. Yet many organisations find there are obstacles that impact their progress to creating an equal, diverse and inclusive workplace.
There are practical measures you can apply to improve your DE&I recruitment strategy. Ultimately, these measures will help you attract, employ and retain the best talent.
Why create a diverse workforce?
Not only is recruiting for DE&I the right thing to do, it’s also a sensible commercial strategy. There are many recognised benefits of diversity and inclusion in the workplace. By unlocking underrepresented talent networks, an organisation can improve:
- Customer orientation and service.
- Innovation.
- Productivity.
- Profitability.
- Staff engagement and retention.
To take advantage of these benefits, you need to ensure your hiring process first attracts diverse candidates. Your recruitment team needs to assess without bias within an inclusive work environment that creates equal opportunities for all.
Your organisation needs real DE&I progress to attract the best talent
Failing to commit to real and lasting DE&I action can have a negative impact on your business, for example:
- Weakening your employment brand.
- Damaging your candidate attraction.
- Lowering staff retention rates.
Research shows that 66% of UK workers say that diversity, equity and inclusion is important to them. An organisation’s DE&I policies will be key considerations in deciding who to work for.
How to recruit a diverse workforce: attract diverse candidates
Employers are looking at how recruitment processes can be changed to help them create a more diverse workforce. If improving diversity in the workplace is important to you, here are nine inclusive recruitment tips to consider:
1. Update your recruitment marketing materials
Communicating your commitment to DE&I can have a significant impact on your ability to attract more diverse candidates. You can achieve this by:
- Ensuring your website and careers pages effectively represent your company culture.
- Creating a set of clear and unbiased tone of voice guidelines for those who write job descriptions.
- Making sure imagery used on recruitment marketing materials reflects a diverse workforce.
Your employees can also be strong champions of your employer brand. In fact, employee advocacy can be far more influential in attracting candidates than any message you promote.
2. Review strategies for attracting qualified candidates
If the channels you use to attract job seekers are not delivering people with a diverse background, you may need a new approach. Look at new channels or means of attracting under-represented demographic groups into your organisation.
There are various options to consider when looking to widen the diversity of your applicants such as:
- Specialist recruitment agencies.
- Social media, including forums and community pages.
- Your company website.
- Industry bodies.
- Partnerships with networks, groups or charities.
- Aggregated job boards.
- Referral programmes.
3. Consider implementing diversity recruitment targets
Diversity recruitment targets can have a positive impact on attracting diverse candidates. However, there can be hesitation around introducing formal targets. Targets can ensure an attraction and selection process is inclusive by mitigating any unconscious bias.
If targets aren’t for you, some organisations prefer a policy of ‘comply or explain’. This is where hiring managers must explain if they are unable to produce balanced and diverse shortlists.
4. Run unconscious bias training for hiring managers
Unconscious bias can have a huge impact in the recruitment process. Though there may be a greater awareness of this, you should still provide key stakeholders with testing and training.
By providing testing and training for unconscious bias stakeholders can recognise and mitigate the effects. Helping hiring managers and interviewers identify and understand theirs can positively encourage equality in candidate selection.
5. Incorporate technology to create a diverse review process
By utilising Artificial Intelligence algorithms you can quickly analyse vast datasets and identify candidates with the right skills and qualifications. Companies can also design AI algorithms to identify and mitigate biases in the diversity recruitment process. A more diverse range of stakeholders in the initial screening process can improve equal opportunities. Having a range of people from different backgrounds, perspectives and opinions reviewing CVs can help to balance selection outcomes.
6. For inclusive recruitment, consider a blind recruitment strategy
Consider blind recruitment to mitigate bias in decision making. A blind recruitment strategy involves removing identifying features from an application prior to review, such as:
- Age.
- Gender or gender identity.
- Ethnicity.
- Name.
You may even consider using AI to automate the removal of identifying data. This will help your recruitment team to focus on skills and aptitudes alone.
7. Structure your interview process to promote equal opportunity
A structured interview process is one that asks the same list of questions in the same order. Using the same list of questions in the same order puts everyone on an even playing field. This allows each candidate to demonstrate their skills and aptitudes equally.
In an unstructured interview, the interviewer asks different questions which makes it difficult to compare candidates equally.
8. Coach interviewers on how to discuss diversity and inclusivity
With DE&I a common topic of discussion in job interviews, hiring managers must fully understand your organisation’s strategy. Recruitment teams must know how to effectively discuss this with interviewees.
Recruiters can provide examples of how your organisation has championed diversity, equity and inclusion. They can show the positive impact this has on individual employees as well as the wider organisation.
9. Authentically communicate progress in your diversity recruitment goals
Make sure you communicate your DE&I agenda and progress with your workforce in a regular and transparent way. Announcing genuine progress will help with employee retention efforts. However if your progress isn’t authentic your employees won’t promote your efforts or remain long-term.
How to recruit diverse candidates: our final thoughts
Working towards the creation of a truly equal, diverse and inclusive workplace is an ongoing journey. The process also requires regular reviews. First you must set realistic targets and then you can begin the process of:
- Measuring
- Evaluating
- Reporting
From here you can clearly gauge your progress and determine what new actions you must take to deliver change.
When considering how to recruit a diverse workforce trust these recruitment tips. You’ll be able to turn theory into action within a diverse team. So, look ahead and work towards achieving diversity, equity and inclusion recruitment best practice.
Learn more about the importance of diversity in recruitment:
AUTHOR
Dan Robertson
MD, FAIRER Consulting
Dan began his career in race equality and inclusion management, working across public policy and private sector strategy. Over the last 15 years, he has spent his time supporting global business leaders to transform their ideas into meaningful action, with a focus on inclusion as a strategic management issue, bias mitigation and inclusive leadership.
Dan is widely regarded as a global expert on workplace diversity and inclusive leadership.