Designing Recruiting Processes to Create Diverse and Inclusive Workplaces

Hiring candidates for any role, whether through internal promotions or via external applicants, can be a challenging task for any employer. Along with ensuring the best or most suitable candidate is chosen for the role, there are a number of human rights issues to navigate as well.

When evaluating most employers’ hiring processes, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are three values that many organizations today strive to embody. Research has shown that having diverse talent on board leads to higher levels of productivity, innovation, and performance. It also helps to improve employee retention rates, which further promote a positive view of an organization. Employers, particularly in the municipal sector, may also be motivated by a desire to hire candidates that are a reflection of the broader community they serve.

A recruitment process that seeks to ensure a broad representation of candidates may assist a municipality to ensure it promotes the principles of DEI, while also aligning with the legal obligation that employers have to ensure their hiring practices comply with the prohibition against discrimination in employment under the Ontario Human Rights Code.

Establishing Effective Recruitment Processes

There are three primary steps in the recruitment process: 1) posting, advertising and sourcing; 2) interviewing; and 3) selection of a candidate.

Posting Advertising and Sourcing

When advertising for a role or sourcing candidates, an employer will want to consider barriers to access and how the employer can eliminate them. Two ways to do so are: to expand where job postings are advertised; and to potentially implement a software that blurs or otherwise blocks the name of an applicant to avoid any biases.

Employers will also want to ensure they have well drafted recruitment policies, as they not only create transparency in the recruitment process, but they also create consistency for all hiring and establish a narrative for the organization’s culture and commitments to their employees.

Interviewing Candidates

When interviewing candidates, employers should use standardized job interview processes for all candidates, such as creating a set of the same interview questions, and establishing diverse interview panels. Having a team approach to hiring is helpful as it is more likely to prevent errors and omissions in the hiring process, and allows for more diverse perspectives. An interview panel should also be trained for unconscious biases prior to commencing the interviews.

It is important to note that employers should refrain from asking about human rights prohibited grounds in interviews (such as age, religion, family status, etc.). Although it seems obvious to state, these questions can come up even in casual conversations outside of the formal interview.

While an employer should not ask about prohibited grounds of discrimination in an interview, an employer should let a candidate know that there are accommodation policies and procedures in place should they require that support.

Hiring Decisions

When it comes to ultimately selecting a candidate, employers want to ensure that the reasons for picking a particular candidate are fair and neutral and are not the result of any bias, conscious or unconscious, that may suggest the hiring was discriminatory.

Special Programs

Organizations can also choose to develop “special programs” to help disadvantaged groups improve their situation. The Ontario Human Rights Code recognizes the importance of addressing historical disadvantage by protecting special programs to help marginalized groups. Under the Code, it is not discriminatory to put in place a special program if it is designed to relieve hardship or economic disadvantage; help disadvantaged people or groups to achieve, or try to achieve, equal opportunity; or help eliminate discrimination. A special program must satisfy at least one of these points to be considered a special program under the Code.

While recruitment processes continue to evolve to facilitate more diverse and equitable workplaces, the practices outlined above can, over time, work to meet those goals and ensure that employers are maintaining their legal obligations. These changes are not easy, and are unlikely to happen overnight, but if organizations are committed to the changes, these goals are possible to achieve.

Written by Anoushka Zachariah, a lawyer at Hicks Morley