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When it comes to hearing about new career opportunities, women are just as
interested as men. LinkedIn’s recent Gender Insights Report revealed that
88% of women are open to new job opportunities compared with 90% of men,
and they view jobs in almost equal numbers.
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9/22/22, 1:24 PM 8 Tips to Improve the Gender Diversity of Your Recruiting Pipeline
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But despite these similarities, something happens between the awareness and
application stages. LinkedIn’s data shows that women are 16% less likely than
men to apply for a job they’ve viewed, often because they feel that they’re not
100% qualified for the role. And since a woman’s chances of being hired are
essentially zero if she is the only female finalist for a role, nurturing a healthy
gender balance from the get-go can help ensure more women make it through
the pipeline to the other side.
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9/22/22, 1:24 PM 8 Tips to Improve the Gender Diversity of Your Recruiting Pipeline
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To fix any leaks in your pipeline, here are eight simple steps you can take to
create and maintain more gender balance in the crucial early stages of the hiring
process.
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9/22/22, 1:24 PM 8 Tips to Improve the Gender Diversity of Your Recruiting Pipeline
1. Assess
Talent Blog your company’s current gender split to
First, dig into your company’s data to get a clear idea of your overall gender
split. Then go even deeper, looking at how you’re doing across specific
departments, functions, and seniority levels to identify your main areas for
improvement. If your company is near a 50:50 gender split overall but female
representation plummets at the management level and above, the company-
level figures won’t tell the complete story.
You can use LinkedIn Talent Insights to assess the breakdown of your
workforce in seconds. This tool also enables you to compare how you stack up to
industry averages, which may inform your strategies and goals. If you’re in an
industry that struggles with female representation as a whole, for example, you
might choose to set moderate targets, at least at first. But if you’re lagging
behind your competitors, it may be time to develop a more aggressive strategy.
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To encourage more women to hit the apply button or respond to your outreach,
be sure that your commitment to diversity comes across on all your employer
branding channels. This includes your career site, the Life section of your
LinkedIn Company Page, and any social media platforms you use to promote
your culture and jobs.
Once you've strengthened your employer brand, you can get it in front of more
people by using Sponsored Content on LinkedIn. This can help you build
awareness among the diverse audiences you want to reach by putting relevant
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ads directly in their LinkedIn feed, encouraging them to visit your newly
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refurbished Company Page or careers site to find out more about working at
your organization.
Give your job descriptions a final read-through before you post to make sure
you’ve scrubbed them of any potentially off-putting language. Alternatively, you
can run them through Textio, TapRecruit, or Talvista, augmented writing
platforms that highlight gender-coded words and phrases and suggest gender-
neutral alternatives.
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more qualifications than men do before applying. So if your list includes some
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requirements that are nice to have but nonessential, you could be hurting your
pipeline without even realizing it.
Instead of lumping everything you want under the requirements list, consider
having a separate list of “preferred qualifications” to clearly signal the difference
between a requirement and an added bonus.
After a job post is live, be sure to track your view-to-apply ratios. LinkedIn
Jobs lets you monitor your conversion rate by gender, so you can spot if
something isn’t working and make adjustments on the fly.
LinkedIn found that 68% of women say it’s important information for
them when they’re considering a job. Since gender pay gaps exist across
virtually every industry, this step can help build trust very early in the process,
letting female applicants know that you’re committed to transparency and
fairness.
If your company offers flexible work options, highlight those as well, as they
may make all the difference for some women.
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some or all of the time — or having the option to fit work hours around other
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commitments — can be especially valuable to new mothers transitioning back
into the workforce and to women who are caregivers for sick family members.
The best thing about these policies is that they’re appealing to candidates
across every demographic. So while they may open the door for more
female applicants, they’re also a perk that many male candidates will be
interested to learn about too.
You can use LinkedIn Talent Insights for this too. Using the Talent Pool
report feature, you can immediately identify U.S. cities that have a good
gender balance for the type of talent you want to recruit. This can help you spot
untapped talent pools, allowing you to explore candidates who might be willing
to relocate to your region.
Talent Insights can also reveal industries that have a better gender balance — so
you may even be able to identify promising candidates with the right skills in a
different industry than your own. Candidates are often open to a change in
career, so this can be a great source of talent that your competitors aren’t yet
aware of.
As you search for diverse talent on LinkedIn, your Boolean strings can do a lot
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of the hard work for you. But using generic terms like “women” probably won’t
deliver the kind of results you want. Instead, sourcing master Glen Cathey
recommends finding a list of women’s colleges and universities and using
them to build your Boolean string.
Simply insert the search operator OR between the name of each school, add
parentheses around the complete list, and add other search terms, such as a job
title, after the list with the search operator AND to narrow down your results.
Your finished string should look something like this:
You can also try swapping out college names for names of sororities, since these
will often produce female college grads with the skill set you’re looking for. And
if you want to extend your search beyond candidates with college degrees,
plugging in a list of female-friendly associations and organizations can also do
the trick.
Referrals, for example, are a prime source of quality hires for many companies,
but are more likely to bring male candidates into the pipeline than
female ones. This is especially true if your workforce is currently made up of
more men than women, since people tend to network with those similar to
themselves.
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In this case, educating your employees about your company’s diversity and
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inclusion (D&I) initiatives can help them think more broadly when looking at
their network, helping to curb unconscious bias. Some companies also
incentivize referrals of candidates from underrepresented groups to show their
commitment to their D&I goals.
If you send messages through LinkedIn Recruiter, you can chart the
performance of your InMails by gender. This makes it easy to tell if
women aren’t responding as often as men. If that’s the case, you may want to
tweak your messaging by experimenting with a different tone or double-
checking that the language is truly gender-neutral.
For more insights into how men and women approach the job hunt differently,
download the full Gender Insights Report today.
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Topics:
Diversity
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