Today, LinkedIn is launching brand new gender diversity insights across its talent products to help businesses find, hire and develop more diverse teams. With gender representation being a top priority for companies across the world, the first update includes gender insights that will help businesses identify more representative pools of talent, with further enhancements launching in 2019.
LinkedIn’s 2018 Global Recruiting Trends revealed that diversity ranked as the top priority for talent professionals in the UK, with 82% seeing it as crucial to their hiring strategy. In fact, LinkedIn research shows that 78% of companies prioritise diversity to improve culture and 62% see it as a factor in boosting financial performance. Despite a clear ambition, 38% of recruiters say one of their biggest challenges is actually finding and hiring diverse talent.
As organisations look to build more diverse and winning teams, LinkedIn is supporting them with its ‘diversity by design’ ethos. This means that we are integrating diversity insights across our talent product portfolio, giving businesses insights to help meet their diversity goals. The new updates will:
Help businesses tap into diverse talent pools
While there are many facets of diversity, the first updates begin with aggregated gender insights. These gender insights have been added to the Talent Pool reports in LinkedIn’s Talent Insights to give businesses and recruiters real-time gender representation information for different talent pockets across the UK, and globally*. This will allow businesses to identify opportunities by city, industry, job title and skills, and will spotlight alternative talent pools with greater gender representation. For example, by using these insights a business might find that other sectors or cities have a greater representation of women with the skills they’re looking for.
Show businesses a diverse mix of qualified candidates
In LinkedIn’s flagship product, Recruiter, search will reflect the gender distribution of the underlying talent pool when presenting search results. a more representative mix of qualified candidates will be listed when businesses search for talent - reflecting the gender distribution in that talent pool. For example, if there are 6,500 engineers (40% women, 60% men), a search on Recruiter will show approximately 40% of women and 60% of men on the first page of search results, more accurately representing the available pool of candidates.
Help inform inclusive hiring strategies
Over the next few weeks, LinkedIn Recruiter will also show businesses and recruiters how their jobs and InMails are performing across genders to ensure inclusive tone, language, and targeting. For example, if businesses find that men are disproportionately more likely to respond to job posts or InMails, they can consider rewriting them so they contain more inclusive language, and are more likely to drive female applicants.
John Jersin, Global VP Product Management for LinkedIn Talent Solutions : “Organisations want to create more diverse and inclusive workplaces, but the reality is that businesses are finding it challenging to find, hire and retain diverse talent. This is where we want to help. With more than 590m professionals on Linkedin globally we can provide businesses with real-time insights to support their hiring strategies - from identifying new talent pools to attracting diverse candidates.
While there are many facets of diversity, gender is just the start, and our long-term vision at LinkedIn is to introduce additional diversity insights across other demographics.”
Additional diversity insights will be introduced to the Company Report within the Talent Insights product in the first half of 2019. This will allow businesses to see the gender representation of a company’s overall workforce as well as within different functions, with the ability to benchmark against industry averages. These insights are currently available only for the U.S. workforce.
Training for diversity, inclusion, and belonging
Recognising that real impact comes from teams who are committed to removing bias in hiring practices, LinkedIn Learning has released a number of courses on diversity to help hiring managers and leaders tackle unconscious bias and create the best culture for hiring more inclusive teams. These online courses will be free to view and use until the end of November: Confronting Bias, Managing Diversity, Inclusive Leadership and Unconscious Bias.
You can read more about how the new gender diversity insights will help businesses and talent professionals hire, retain and cultivate more inclusive teams in this LinkedIn blog post. Visual assets/images of the diversity insights updates are here: https://app.box.com/s/88iqgt91d9nqdhvy3s8hqf4gi11ho38l
*Talent Pool report will provide aggregated gender insights with a minimum threshold of 50 professionals, and where gender can be inferred by at least 67% to ensure the information is as accurate as possible and does not reveal a gender attribution for individual members.