Diversity Monitoring Best Practice

How to use diversity monitoring for better recruitment practice

Diversity Monitoring is the process of collecting anonymised data from your candidates or employees to monitor how diverse your database or workplace is.

A lot of businesses use diversity monitoring to ensure they're offering equal opportunities to all candidates and employees.

More and more businesses are looking to put diversity at the heart of their recruitment efforts – 85% of businesses think improving diversity is important and recruiting from diverse groups is the way to improve it.

Firefish has features specifically designed to help you improve diversity when hiring.

If you're a Firefish Professional or Enterprise user, switching on diversity recording will allow you to begin collecting anonymised diversity data when candidates fill out a registration form.

The diversity data you collect should always be anonymised to prevent any form of bias and ensure no applications are treated differently based on the information they provide. With this in mind, never add notes to candidate records that relate to diversity as this can lead to positive discrimination (which is illegal) and it’s also in breach of GDPR.

If you're recruiting in-house, you can then use Firefish’s diversity reporting to report on how diverse your hiring efforts have been.

If you're an agency, the Diversity option allows you to review how diverse your pools of candidates are applying to your jobs and feed this information back to your clients as part of your service.

Diversity fields and options to add to your registration process

When creating a diversity form as part of your candidate registration, it's important to give candidates enough choice that the options on your forms speak to them. Candidates can become disengaged if they feel the options provided on registration forms aren't inclusive to them.

Firefish has standard diversity fields that allow you to create your own options for different fields on your forms.

Below we’ve listed some recommended options for our standard fields, and also listed some suggestions you could add to the custom fields for extra monitoring.

Please note that the below lists are merely recommendations on field values and potential custom fields. This list is in no way exhaustive.

Standard Fields

Gender

Male
Female
Non-binary
Other
Prefer not to say

Sexual Orientation

Straight or Heterosexual
Gay or Lesbian
Bisexual
Other sexual orientation
Prefer not to say

Ethnicity

White – British, Irish, European, White other
Asian – Chinese, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Indian, Asian other
Black – British, African, Caribbean, Black other
Mixed
Other
Prefer not to say

Religious belief

None
Christian (Including all denominations)
Muslim
Buddhist
Sikh
Jewish
Hindu
Other
Prefer not to say

Custom Fields

Gender Identity

Q: Is your Gender Identity the same as the gender you were assigned at birth?

Yes
No
Prefer not to say
He/Him/His
She/Her/Hers
Them/They/Theirs
Ze/Zir/Zirs
Other
Prefer not to say

3 benefits of collecting diversity data

Collecting anonymised diversity data has lots of benefits for both internal monitoring and as a potential selling point for your agency.

Here's just a few:

Diversify your workforce
Monitoring diversity will help you diversify your network or workforce and ensure you have the widest talent pools possible. You can use your diversity data to identify gaps and create recruitment campaigns that target candidates from these underrepresented groups.
Appeal to new candidates
Your diversity data can also be used as a selling point when speaking to potential candidates. You can use your data to create promotional brand material such as visual reports or whitepapers that demonstrate your inclusive recruitment processes. You can send these reports to candidates or showcase them on your website.
Show clients you're an inclusive recruiter
If you're an agency, you can also talk about your diversity data when pitching for new business. Create reports from your anonymised diversity data in Firefish and use this as proof that you're an agency that cares about inclusive recruitment.