Diversity Recruiting

What diversity recruiting means in practice

Most of the useful work in diversity recruiting is unglamorous process work. It falls into two buckets.

Widening the pool: posting where you have not posted before, building relationships with community colleges, workforce boards, veterans' organizations, disability employment programs and community groups, writing job ads that do not quietly exclude people, and removing requirements that are not needed for the job.

Making selection fair: structured interviews, consistent scoring, job-related assessments, trained interviewers, and checking your data for stages where some groups drop out at higher rates. This is often called inclusive hiring, and it benefits every candidate, not only underrepresented ones.

It sits inside a broader diversity, equity and inclusion program, but recruiting is where the most measurable change usually happens.

Where the legal lines are

In the US, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employment decisions based on race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation and gender identity) and national origin. Other federal laws protect age (40 and over), disability and genetic information, and many states add more categories. Those protections apply to everyone, including members of majority groups. In 2025 the Supreme Court confirmed in Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services that majority-group plaintiffs do not face a higher burden to bring a discrimination claim.

What this means for practice:

• Generally lawful: broad outreach to under-reached communities, partnerships with diverse organizations, inclusive job ad language, removing unnecessary requirements, structured and consistent assessment, diverse interview panels, and analyzing your own data.
• Not lawful for private employers: quotas, hiring or rejecting anyone because of a protected characteristic, ranking or scoring candidates differently by group, and sourcing or interview slots reserved only for one group.
• Federal contractors: Executive Order 11246 affirmative action obligations for race and sex were revoked in January 2025. Obligations under Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act (disability) and VEVRAA (protected veterans) remain.

Rules vary by state and change often; review programs with employment counsel.

How to measure it: adverse impact

The most useful measurement is not the diversity of your hires in isolation but whether each step of your process treats groups similarly. The long-standing screen is the four-fifths rule from the federal Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures (1978): if a group's selection rate at a step is less than 80 percent of the rate for the group with the highest rate, that is generally regarded as evidence of adverse impact worth investigating.

Example: at the phone screen stage, 60 percent of one group's applicants pass and 42 percent of another's. 42 divided by 60 is 0.70, below 0.80. That does not prove discrimination, but it tells you to look at what the screen is measuring. A disparate impact claim arises when a neutral practice disproportionately excludes a protected group and the employer cannot show it is job-related and consistent with business necessity.

Run this check by stage (application, screen, assessment, interview, offer) at least quarterly for high-volume roles, using voluntary self-identification data kept separate from hiring decisions.

Practices that actually move the numbers

• Remove requirements that are not needed. Degree requirements for roles that do not need one are a common barrier. See skills-based hiring.
• Standardize screening. Use the same knockout criteria and the same interview questions for everyone in a role, scored against a rubric.
• Reduce identifying information at early stages. Blind hiring techniques, such as hiding names and addresses during resume review, limit some forms of bias at the screening step.
• Recruit where people are. For hourly roles, bus-line access, evening interview slots and Spanish-language or bilingual materials often matter more than any campaign.
• Train interviewers and hold them to the rubric. Track score distributions by interviewer to spot outliers.
• Audit any automated tools you use to screen or rank candidates for adverse impact, and keep the results.

Common mistakes

• Focusing only on top-of-funnel. Sourcing a more varied applicant pool does nothing if the same groups drop out at the assessment stage.
• Diversity slates or targets that turn into de facto quotas. Requiring a certain number of candidates from one group before an interview can proceed has drawn legal challenges.
• Collecting demographic data in a way that reaches decision-makers. Keep self-identification data separate.
• One-off events instead of steady partnerships. A single career fair rarely changes anything. Ongoing relationships with a few community organizations usually do.
• No owner. Without someone accountable for the stage-by-stage data, nothing changes. For more ideas on building varied teams, read our post on how to build a diverse marketing team.