Boston, MA—Embracing Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives is essential to attracting and retaining top talent, yet businesses still face persistent challenges in meeting these objectives. To help companies in this area, the workforce solutions and global staffing firm Aquent, has launched a new diversity recruiting solution for hiring managers called Diversity+. This is one of the staffing industry’s first fully customizable offerings to provide businesses with diversity recruiting expertise, customized goal-setting, access to diverse talent communities, and robust reporting and insights.
Statistics show that workers overwhelmingly value being at a company that celebrates diversity and inclusion. One survey found that sentiment to be shared by close to 80% of workers, with “more than half (53%) consider[ing] it to be ‘very important’ to them.” On the flip side, a report found that a staggering “76% of companies have no diversity or inclusion goals at all,” with 75% of companies failing to include DEI in their “leadership development or overall learning and development curricula.” The problem is particularly acute in the marketing industry as a 2020 Marketing Week Career and Salary Survey found that close to 90% of those surveyed identified as white, with just 4% identifying as mixed race, 5% as Asian and 2% as Black.
“The lack of diversity in the workforce is a major social justice issue of our time that needs to be addressed immediately—with concrete action not lip service,” said Aquent CEO John H. Chuang. “As an extension of our company’s longstanding commitment to equity, we created Diversity+ to help organizations build a more diverse workplace across their employee and contingent workforce.”
One of the major challenges to building diverse teams is the underrepresentation of diverse talent in candidate pools and interview shortlists. Diversity+ helps organizations address this challenge in a number of important ways:
- Access to a Specialized Diversity Hiring Team: Experienced, dedicated recruiters develop talent pipelines and identify candidates for specific job functions.
- Talent Attraction Best Practices: A number of best practices are also deployed to attract talent from a variety of backgrounds and experiences, including eliminating biased language in job descriptions, conducting outreach to other organizations, including colleges and universities and utilizing diversity job boards, like the Professional Diversity Network. Aquent has developed a strong partnership with this network and is the only recruiting firm on the organization’s site.
- Creating Customizable Goals: A comprehensive recruiting plan is created based on a client’s diversity goal to help attract and source candidates tailored to their needs.
- Comprehensive Talent Data: Aquent collects voluntary data from candidates on their ethnicity, gender identity, veteran status, age, neurodiversity, ability, and LGBTQIA+ status, which enables recruiters to develop diversified candidate shortlists. Engagement has been strong, with 98% of new talent applicants volunteering their information.
- Utilizing Proprietary Tools: Recruiting technology leverages rich, informed talent data to ensure representation of diversity goals in candidate shortlists—always protecting candidate privacy and following legal and ethical recruiting practices.
- Robust Reporting: Visibility and insights into candidate pool demographics helps clients identify opportunities to enhance the diversity of their teams—something very few staffing and recruiting agencies provide.
“There is no one-size-fits-all solution for finding diverse candidates today because the starting point and goals of each company are different. With Diversity+, organizations can now embrace many types of diversity, regardless of where they are in their journey. This is particularly advantageous today as the continued seismic shift to remote work has enabled many companies to hire top talent from anywhere in the world,” added Chuang.
Aquent’s Diversity+ solution also speaks to the company’s continued focus on fostering DEI in all aspects of its operations. For example, Aquent has established an employee-led DEI Council, created a new Head of Culture and Community role, provided staff-wide training, enhanced its proprietary recruiting software to allow talent to specify their pronouns, among other initiatives. Last year, Aquent also announced a set of company-wide initiatives designed to foster racial equality.
Diversity+ is available for Aquent and Vitamin T clients in support of their contingent, temporary-to-permanent, and permanent recruitment efforts at no additional cost. Explore more about Diversity+ solution and how we are committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
