Everyone has internal biases, whether conscious or unconscious, and they affect all aspects of our lives—including the people we want to hire. Some examples in the hiring process are:
- Similarity bias: hiring those that think, look and have similar interests.
- Confirmation bias: basing your decision about someone’s qualifications based on an entirely different aspect (i.e., someone is well-dressed and has an impeccable resume) where you assume this means they will be the best candidate.
- Projection bias: believing someone who shares your own goals, beliefs and opinions makes them good for the organization.
- Nonverbal bias: judging a candidate’s ability to do a job based on superficial traits like tattoos, weight or overall appearance.
💡 In the 40 years between 1980 and 2020, the white working-age population has declined from 83% of the nation’s total to 63%, while the number of minority workers has doubled. If candidates don’t see themselves in your culture and brand, you may be missing out on a future workforce that will lead you through the next 40 years.
The Mom Project's Diverse Talent Cloud Platform is built with diversity at its core. From branding to unbiased job descriptions to curating, vetting, interviewing and upskilling, we are helping companies reduce these biases in order to take advantage of all of the benefits a diverse workforce —be it full-time, part-time, independent contractor, freelancer or project-based worker—can offer.
Branding
How you brand your organization can have a big impact on attracting and retaining diverse talent. Having a D&I landing page is great, but incorporating and communicating your brand through partners engaged in actively finding your talent is critical.
Our Diverse Talent Cloud enables employers to leverage the strength of our brand into your talent attraction strategy, resulting in improved employee sentiment and retention of women, minorities and parents. Together, we can partner to co-market and share success stories, rooted in successfully unlocking the “potential of mom” at your organization. Think of us as an extension of your organization and ambassador of your brand.
Clear, unbiased job descriptions
Job descriptions can hold a lot of bias and dissuade certain candidates from applying for a given role. Understanding and having an awareness of how words attract different candidates is important. A few examples of how job descriptions can imply certain biases include:
- Chairperson (versus Chairman)
- Using words like “aggressive,” “driven” and “competitive” are seen as more masculine. Consider words like “proactive” and “collaboration,” which can say the same thing but are more all-encompassing
- Using phrases like “veterans and/or their spouses” instead could be written “veterans and their partners”
- Replacing “he/she” and “his/her” language with “they/their”
- Instead of promoting “maternity” leave as a benefit, consider “family time-off”
We consult with organizations to improve job description language so you’re capturing all candidates and not ones who feel put off by a job description that they could ultimately be the best person for.
Candidate matching
The Mom Project Diverse Talent Cloud uses matching algorithms, including Natural Language and Neural Net Matching, which improves match accuracy and helps hiring managers remove unconscious biases that may exist. With our robust community outreach programs, our highly skilled team of talent advocates are able to place the best talent in a position that is best suited for them.
💡 To help candidates put their best self forward, The Mom Project Community offers Resume Rev, a resource that guides mom with tips and questions to make their resume reflect their skills and knowledge. This, in return, helps hiring managers know when they receive a resume, it’s the most qualified person for the role and that person can perform a given job.
Access opportunities for reskilling/upskilling
Our DTC is made up of 90% women and 50% gender/ethnically diverse candidates, all who have 8-10 years of professional experience (on average). We provide another talent strategy for finding highly qualified, diverse talent that can come into your organization and make an immediate impact. At the same time, we level the playing field for talent who often struggle to access the best opportunities.
Upskilling and reskilling this pool of talent helps address the skills gap in fields like technology, finance, government and other male-dominated industries by providing access to talent that may have the skills, but due to time away from the workforce for caregiving responsibilities, may need additional training or mentoring.
Reporting
EEOC reporting allows companies to track and report on their diverse workforce, providing a key indicator on whether you are effectively achieving your DE&I goals. Our Diverse Talent Cloud has robust reporting, so they can adjust talent strategies as needed. Our post-hire program reporting can be augmented with comparison to diversity baselines. This provides actionable data on success and highlights opportunity areas.
This data and analytics mean, together, we can dynamically manage the workforce to create beneficial outcomes for all parties. The data can be used to impact organization-wide decision-making, solve complex business, and achieve diversity goals.
Alleviating the hiring biases
The Mom Project’s Diverse Talent Cloud helps alleviate many of the biases that arise during the hiring process. Our inclusive technology is built to address the needs of women and women of color to a wider circle of holistic diversity, including gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation and veteran status.
As a part of our commitment to this topic, this is the third in the series "Diverse Talent Cloud - The Future of Work," intended to help shed light on their importance, ways to integrate them into your existing talent strategies, implementation best practices, and how to best support these initiatives organizationally. We look forward to sharing more with you soon. In the meantime, be sure to sign up for more information and to learn how we can help you unlock the power of moms:
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