How to Understand and Implement DEI in Your Hiring

Startups are hotbeds of innovation, trailblazers in the world of business. They’re forward-thinking boundary breakers, constantly challenging norms and redefining what the future is going to be about.

Despite this inspiring image, however, startups are not always ahead of the curve. Only 1% of venture-backed founders are Black, and women hold only 8% of the board seats with startup tech companies. What’s more, only 26% of startups are actively trying to increase diversity within their leadership teams. This is a bigger problem than just talent pipeline.

One of the best ways to make startups more diverse, inclusive, and fair is to start with the hiring process by working to ensure no good candidate is excluded unfairly — we call this DEI.

In this article, we’ll talk about the concept of DEI and how startups can implement it in their hiring by providing a few useful resources.

What exactly is DEI?

DEI stands for diversity, equity, and inclusion. It captures three key values that companies should embrace if they want to create a more diverse workforce and a fairer and more welcoming work environment for talented people from all backgrounds and demographic groups.

Let’s break down each part of the acronym:

• Diversity is when a company has a wide range of different people within its workforce. This means fair representation for people of different races, ethnicities, sexual orientations, ages, and socioeconomic backgrounds.
• Equity is all about making sure things are fair. People should be treated, compensated, and recognized fairly no matter who they are, where they come from, or what they look like.
• Inclusion means making sure everyone in the workplace feels welcomed, valued, and included. People should feel free to be themselves at work and experience a sense of belonging to the team.

Why is DEI so important in hiring?

Apart from being the morally and socially right thing to do, making DEI a key part of your company culture also comes with impressive tangible benefits. Here are some stats to consider:

• Companies that are more inclusive are 120% more likely to reach their financial goals.
• Companies with a roughly even share of men and women earn 41% more revenue.
• Racially and ethnically diverse companies are 35% more likely to perform better financially than less diverse competitors.
  
  

Diversity, equitability, and inclusion work. Diverse teams are usually more engaged, productive teams and they foster a culture of innovation. Blending different perspectives, skill sets, and new modes of thinking in a positive environment is a heady recipe for success and productive decision-making.

The hiring process is where this starts. By focusing on DEI goals from the very beginning, you can create a hiring environment that welcomes and supports people from all backgrounds, which ultimately allows you to create a team of diverse talent and instill initiatives and a company culture built on those values.

On the other hand, hiring practices that don’t focus on DEI runs the risk of becoming biased toward certain groups, excluding others, and leading to inequities and over-representation of some types of people.

Often, this is completely unintentional — businesses can gravitate towards certain hiring channels, metrics, interview styles, and selection criteria that exclude or disadvantage certain people without even realizing it. Implementing DEI initiatives in your hiring process has to be a conscious choice. So how can you do it?

How to implement DEI in your hiring:

Identify any areas for improvement

A good place to start when promoting DEI in your recruitment process is by conducting an audit of your company as it is today. Try to identify any “DEI gaps” in your hiring process and business as a whole, as this should give you some concrete first steps to take.

Talk to your current teams, send out some surveys, review your existing hiring processes, interview processes, initiatives, and materials, and look out for things that might discourage people from certain demographics or unfairly prioritize others.

This is also a good opportunity to assess how diverse, inclusive, and equitable your current workforce is. Lots of companies shy away from this, but it’s worth doing as it helps you gain an idea of what you’re working with, what you’d like to work towards, and a more measurable grasp of what you need to do.

Use inclusive language

The language you use at the various stages of your hiring process can have a significant impact on how people respond and the kind of message you send to potential applicants and hires.

Inclusive language avoids using phrases, slang, examples, scenarios, and idioms that may confuse or exclude certain audiences. Here’s how to use more inclusive language in your hiring process:

• Using inclusive language: The United Nations has a useful guide on using inclusive language when crafting job descriptions. has resources on how to write inclusive language when drafting job descriptions.
• Keeping this in mind enables companies to reach and engage underrepresented job seekers.
• Try to avoid slang, idioms, and nuanced colloquialisms as much as possible.
  

Diversify your hiring panel

If your entire hiring team is made up of people from the same backgrounds, similar genders, and the same sexual orientation, it can become more difficult to recruit a wider range of candidates and promote equity and inclusion.

This isn’t because everyone is explicitly biased against people from other backgrounds, but because seeing a diverse group of people during the hiring process can encourage applicants and make them feel more welcome. People may also feel more comfortable sharing information in an interview with someone from a similar background.

A more diverse hiring panel also acts as a good antidote to implicit biases. Everyone has unconscious biases to some extent, but diversifying your hiring panel can help limit the impact of those biases. For example, if your hiring panel is dominated by men, it may be harder for the only woman there to call out bias from her male teammates.

With a more diverse panel, it becomes easier to challenge biased decisions, reach a fairer outcome, and work towards a more inclusive workplace.

Recognizing unconscious biases

Unconscious biases exist, and pretty much everyone has them to some extent. Recruiters might promote a candidate they personally relate to and connect with over a more qualified candidate who would be a better fit for the team, and this could negatively impact the company in the long run.

Teaching your existing team members about these unconscious biases and how to recognize and mitigate them through things like bias training is an essential step to implementing DEI in your hiring and bringing more diverse talent on board. It’s important to stress that these biases are usually nothing to be ashamed of and everyone has them — just be more aware so they don’t impact your ability to hire the very best talent and implement a more inclusive culture.

There are lots of resources available here to help test for and increase awareness of our implicit biases, such as:

• The American Bar Association’s Implicit Bias Test
• Harvard’s Implicit Association Test
• The Learning For Justice Hidden Bias Test
  

Interview a diverse pool of candidates

If the same types of people are all making it to the interview stage, and nobody else is, you may have a problem. If this is the case, take a look at why people from other backgrounds and demographics are being excluded. There could be many explanations:

• They simply aren’t seeing the ads for your job —  this is a sign to diversify and expand your outreach channels beyond obvious choices like Indeed and LinkedIn. A few sites to use are:
• Elpha: is designed as a professional network for women offering content and access to a directory to make it easier for women in the technology industry to connect.
• Mathison: Mathison is the first technology platform to give employers an end-to-end system to build, manage, and measure their DEI strategy, source underrepresented candidates, reduce bias, and build awareness across their organizations.
• The Mom Project: a platform committed to helping women remain active in the workforce in every stage of their journey. They work with employers who are committed to designing and supporting a better workplace.
• Valence: a platform with a mission to create new paths to success for Black professionals.
• The language in the ad is discouraging them from applying.
• There is bias (conscious or unconscious) at play in your screening process and leadership teams.
  
  

…and many more. The key is to make sure your interview pool is sufficiently diverse, so you’re talking to a wide range of people instead of just one homogenous group.

It’s also important to make sure you keep focusing on your DEI efforts beyond the interview stage, through the onboarding process, and into company life.

Find out more about encouraging DEI in your hiring

At The Swarm, we help startups refine and optimize their hiring processes so they get the very best talent on their team.

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