Diversity in the workplace has never been a bigger issue than it is right now. Social causes have propelled outdated social standards to the forefront of our minds. Since we spend so much of our time and energy at work, it’s only natural that these issues have taken center stage there.

At the same time, recruiters and leadership executives have realized that promoting diversity in their organizations leads to powerful business benefits, as well. Companies that have more diverse workforces and talent see more revenue from new and innovative products than those with below-average diversity scores.

Achieving diversity at scale is a tall order, though. HR tech company Joonko promises an innovative and modern solution to this problem. Let’s dive in.

The Importance of Diversity in the Workplace

“Diversity” might seem like a modern buzzword, but really the essence of the concept is timeless: hiring people for their skillset and broad viewpoints, regardless of appearance, beliefs, gender identity, veteran status, or anything else. It’s just the right thing to do.

That said, doing the right thing can, in this case, also be quite lucrative. Diverse companies see more than double the cash flow per employee compared to “non-diverse” organizations, according to studies.

Additionally, racially and ethnically diverse companies are over 30 percent more likely to perform better than their counterparts. Combined, these facts add up to some powerful incentives for ensuring a diverse workplace.

Of course, weaving diversity into an existing company is easier said than done. Like anything else worth doing, there are challenges to recruiting for diversity, particularly as a company scales.

That’s where Joonko comes in. Named after the first woman to scale Mount Everest, Joonko is on a mission to make the world’s workplaces more diverse. In the article, we’ll take a look at a few of the challenges companies might face as they diversify, and how Joonko promises to help meet these challenges.

The Challenges of Building Diversity at Scale

Scaling a company is a challenging enough prospect, but ensuring the right mix of employees from diverse backgrounds can make it seem impossible. Here are some of the challenges an organization might face when attempting to grow and diversify, and how Joonko helps address those challenges.

1. Limited candidate pools

One of the ways that companies hire for diversity is through partnerships with regional universities or local diversity initiatives. Examples might include a city program to help ethnic minorities find jobs or a college that partners with local businesses to help disabled students land their first positions after graduation.

Companies might also post job listings on their website or share them on social platforms like LinkedIn, where employees can help spread the word. These are all fantastic methods for finding candidates for open positions.

However, they suffer from a serious issue: there can only be so many candidates in a given area, and only so many students graduate from a given program or school each year. A LinkedIn post may not reach the right people. Maintaining partnerships, sharing posts, and vetting the candidates that come from them requires a tremendous amount of time and effort.

Finally, most of these talent pools rely on candidates self-identifying as being diverse. If someone makes a mistake on an application, doesn’t check the right box, or even intentionally misleads to increase their chances of being hired, it can prevent the proper candidates from finding the companies that need them.

These are real problems in the recruiting world. Joonko aims to solve them using automation — pulling in candidates through its wide network of partner companies. Joonko’s AI uses publicly available data to automatically determine a candidate’s diversity status based on an eight-point model, saving everyone a significant amount of time and ensuring the largest possible talent pool. With over 100,000 pre-qualified candidates, there’s no shortage of options for companies looking to hire. 

2. Lack of qualified candidates

Another challenge with scaling recruitment of any sort lies in ensuring that the talent pool is qualified for the job at hand. It can be exceptionally difficult to find the right candidate for a position, especially if a company is only drawing from a local or regional level.

Joonko works around this issue in a simple and clever way: when a company in its network makes a hire, the names of other candidates that were considered for the position get automatically passed to Joonko and added to the talent pool (they call these candidates “silver medalists”).

With the huge number of companies hiring for diversity nowadays, this results in a nearly never-ending pool of vetted candidates. For Joonko’s clients, it means they no longer have to worry about weeding out applicants who only look good on paper.

3. Time and resource investments

Hiring is expensive — there are no two ways around it. It’s a time-consuming process, and every applicant who doesn’t successfully land the job effectively costs a company money.

Thanks to the combination of qualified, diverse candidates and the automated nature of Joonko’s solution, the service estimates that companies using Joonko reduce time-to-hire by as much as 16 percent.

This means organizations can fill open positions faster and get more value out of the hiring process. And by feeding candidates directly into the recruiter’s applicant tracking system, Joonko reduces friction, allowing HR to review entries in their own working environments.

Moving Towards a More Diverse Future

Whether a company is just getting started and is still hiring its first employees, or it’s been in business for years and is reaching global scales, ensuring a diverse environment remains a major challenge. However, it’s a challenge worth facing.

Joonko aims to help companies meet this challenge by matching qualified and diverse candidates with hiring companies. It’s a modern solution to a modern problem, and it couldn’t have come at a better time.

Diversity in the workplace has never been a bigger issue than it is right now. Social causes have propelled outdated social standards to the forefront of our minds. Since we spend so much of our time and energy at work, it’s only natural that these issues have taken center stage there.
At the same time,…Read MoreEveryone’s Blog Posts – RecruitingBlogs