The recruitment manager is often the only person focused on candidates' soft skills, namely basic competencies and behaviour. And this is a problem. Read six tips on how to promote greater diversity in teams.
1. First, make sure you have defined for your organisation who is really the right candidate in terms of character and competencies. Remove from your vocabulary such general terms as "cultural adaptation" or "potential", and invest in detailed definitions of soft skills with related evidence-oriented conversation issues.
2. Train your interviewers - not just the recruitment manager, but the entire recruitment team - for quality behavioural and situational interviews with an emphasis on how to ask and evaluate questions about soft skills. Provide information on what compromises you would or would not make (e.g. is it okay to hire an engineer who is reluctant or uncooperative?).
3. Make sure that each interviewer is assigned areas of focus that include both hard and soft skills and that they are qualified to assess these areas of interest.
4. If possible, include interviewers who reflect the diversity you are looking for in the candidate. If you want to bring diversity to your teams, avoid homogeneous interview teams.
5. Discuss retrospectively poor recruitment processes. What did you miss? Was the bad candidate really "bad" because they lacked certain soft skills? If so, how do you give these more weight during the interview?
6. Make sure inclusion is one of the key competencies for which you interview candidates if your goal is team diversity. This is especially important for candidates at managerial level. Build an inclusive culture and assess new candidates to see if they are willing to bring inclusive thinking and expertise to the company.
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