Diversity Hiring Strategies: 14 Best Practices for Attracting Underrepresented Talent

TL;DR

• Anchor diversity hiring in interview-first, mobile flows with blind scoring, smart reminders, and feedback for all.
• Replace resume gates with competency-based, rubric scoring to boost fairness and consistency at speed.
• Operate on five pillars: access, evidence, fairness, momentum, and owned analytics (weekly equity tracking).
• 5-step playbook: define → attract (one entry) → select (chat + blind + nudges) → decide (ranked + SLAs) → start (transparent + accommodations).
• Standardise day-0 expectations and instrument equity by stage/location; write plain-language JDs with essentials vs nice-to-haves.
• Measure completion, time-to-first-interview, show-ups, stage conversion, representation, sentiment, and manager SLA adherence.
• Avoid resume-first, fragmented flows, email-only comms, opaque scoring, and no feedback; Sapia.ai delivers chat-at-apply, blind rubrics, reminders, self-scheduling, feedback, and equity dashboards.

Most companies want to build a diverse workforce, but struggle to translate their diversity goals into actual results. This is especially true when it comes to high-volume hiring.

Why is that? The usual diversity hiring strategies—unconscious bias training, diverse interview panels, inclusive language in job descriptions—help, but they don’t address the structural problems that filter out underrepresented talent before anyone even notices.

In this article, we share 14 diversity and inclusion recruitment best practices that actually work.

Intro to diversity hiring strategies

Volume hiring exposes every weakness in the recruitment process.

When you screen hundreds of applicants at once, bias can creep in via resume shortcuts. Delays compound when managers don’t review candidates quickly enough. Plus, inconsistent evaluation standards hurt both representation and the reliability of your staffing outcomes.

The candidates who suffer most are often those with diverse backgrounds, i.e. people who don’t fit the traditional profile your hiring managers have come to expect.

Effective diversity hiring strategies flip the script through inclusive engagement. By starting every applicant with a structured, mobile-accessible interview, then making hiring decisions blind and explainable while automating reminders and feedback, you keep qualified candidates interested.

This approach delivers better completion rates, fairer shortlists, faster offers, and stronger start rates. And it does these things while protecting the candidate experience that determines whether people accept your offer and recommend you to others.

Brands like Costa Coffee, Spark, and Woodie’s have improved representation through the hiring funnel, and diversity hiring outcomes through strong diversity hiring strategies that are structural – not piecemeal. 

What a diversity recruiting strategy should look like at scale

If you want to build an inclusive hiring process at scale, you need to prioritise access, evidence, fairness, momentum, and ownership. Let’s dig deeper…

• Access for all: Your apply-to-interview flow should be mobile-friendly. And candidates should be able to start a structured interview within minutes of expressing interest. You should also prioritise language options and accessibility features. If your process assumes everyone has a laptop and a quiet room, you’re excluding talent.
• Evidence over proxies: Your hiring process should use competency-aligned questions and rubric-based scoring. Don’t let “top university” or “recognisable brand” become shortcuts for “qualified“. Job seekers from underrepresented groups often lack these traditional signals, but that doesn’t mean they can’t do the work you need them to do.
• Fairness you can show: Blind evaluation is important. Your recruitment flows should hide names, photos, and educational backgrounds during initial scoring. They should also make rationales auditable and track representation at every stage to prove fairness.
• Momentum by design: High-volume recruiting is all about momentum, which is why you should time-box every step, automate reminders, enable self-scheduling, and guarantee feedback for all candidates. Diversity in hiring practices fail when they add friction. Design for speed and experience to keep more people in your funnel.
• Operational ownership: Finally, your TA Operations team should run cadence, while People Analytics monitors equity and leakage. Diversity metrics without operational teeth don’t change anything. Assign owners, set review rhythms, and make weekly fixes.

5 steps to build a diverse workforce

Workforce diversity isn’t rocket science. Follow these five steps to build a fair hiring process:

1. Define

Start with role competencies and outcomes. Then write structured interview questions that map to these things. You should also set guardrails that prevent bias from re-entering. If you can’t explain what “good” looks like, your hiring managers will revert to old habits.

2. Attract

Rewrite job postings in plain language. Then diversify your sourcing channels, but route every candidate to the same interview-first entry point to maintain consistent evaluation. Also important: set clear expectations. Candidates should know exactly how long the interview takes, how you’ll assess their answers, and when they’ll hear back from you.

3. Select

At this point, you need to trigger a mobile chat interview for everyone who applies. Use blind scoring for the first pass—no names, no photos, no school prestige. And send expiry-aware reminders via SMS and email. Next, provide feedback to all interviewees, even those you don’t advance. Feedback builds your employer brand and keeps talent warm for future job openings.

4. Decide

Give hiring managers ranked shortlists with competency evidence and clear rationales. Build in manager SLAs (we suggest 24 to 48 hours for reviews) and automate nudges when candidates age in stage. You should also use second readers for borderline cases to ensure representation.

5. Start

Finally, make your offers transparent. That means sharing pay bands, shift expectations, and growth pathways. You should also capture accommodation needs before the start date. And don’t forget to send document checklists, device-friendly forms, and proactive check-ins. Doing so will help prevent first day no shows, which aren’t a great way to start a working relationship.

14 best practices to connect with diverse candidates

These hiring diversity best practices will help you build a better company culture. We’ve separated them into five distinct categories for your convenience.

Foundation and governance

1. Publish competency profiles per role

Replace prestige proxies, like where a candidate went to school or who they’ve worked for in the past, with job outcomes and observable behaviours. Then store shared question banks so hiring managers can use them for fair evaluation. When everyone uses the same competency model, you reduce unconscious bias and improve the quality of your hiring decisions.

2. Make day-0 expectations standard

Every interview invite should set expectations. How long will the interview take to complete? How are answers assessed? When will candidates hear back? And what privacy protections apply. Transparency reduces anxiety and increases completion rates, especially for candidates from underrepresented groups who may question whether they’ve received fair treatment.

3. Instrument the funnel for equity

Track completion, show-up rates, stage conversion, time-in-stage, and representation by location and brand. You can’t improve diversity if you don’t measure your efforts. Review these diversity metrics on a weekly basis to level up your hiring practices every quarter.

Inclusive attraction

4. Rewrite job ads for clarity and reach

Your job ads should be written with diversity and inclusion in mind. To that end, use plain language, list essential versus optional requirements, highlight inclusive benefits, and add an accommodation statement. Then localise for priority languages and verify mobile readability. Your job descriptions should invite a more diverse talent pool, not turn away top talent.

5. Broaden channel mix without fragmenting process

Pair mainstream job boards with community partners who serve underrepresented groups. But always route candidates to the same interview-first entry point. Fragmented processes that use different evaluation methods for different sources destroy consistency and reintroduce bias.

Fair, fast selection

6. Trigger interview-first at apply

Launch a short, structured, mobile chat interview for 100% of applicants. Once you do, set an interview completion deadline, but enable pause and resume so candidates can fit it around their lives. This approach ensures candidates are evaluated on competencies, not resumes.

7. Blind first-pass evaluation

Hide identifiers like name, photo, and school during the initial scoring process. Then rank candidates based on rubric-aligned evidence only. While blinding doesn’t eliminate bias, it prevents hiring teams from taking the most common shortcuts, especially in volume scenarios.

8. Expiry-aware reminders and self-serve scheduling

What if a candidate abandons their chat interview? Send SMS and email nudges that feature one-tap resume options to get them back on track. We also suggest open self-scheduling for next steps, as well as confirmation and reminder messages 24 hours and 2 hours before scheduled interviews. Most no-shows are forgotten calendar invites, not rejection.

9. Feedback for every interviewee

Once a candidate completes a chat interview, send them strengths-oriented, concise feedback. Said feedback should protect legal boundaries, but avoid vague rejection statements. In addition, invite candidates to re-apply for future roles. These things will improve your employer reputation and help you build a more diverse talent pool that streamlines the hiring process.

Decisions and enablement

10. Ranked, explainable shortlists for managers

Show competency evidence and rationale for every candidate. Then let hiring managers decline or advance said candidates with one tap. When managers are forced to articulate why they’re declining or advancing someone, pattern matching becomes harder to justify.

11. Manager SLAs with gentle enforcement

Delays kill recruitment pipelines. So, set 24 to 48-hour review windows. At the same time, automate nudges to ensure managers adhere to this time frame. Since candidates often accept the first reasonable job offer they receive, not the best one, speed is an inclusion initiative.

12. Equity guardrails at decision points

If you’re serious about your diversity recruiting efforts, add a second-reader step for borderline cases. We also suggest running a quick equity snapshot before extending offers. These guardrails aren’t bureaucracy. They’re checkpoints that catch bias before it happens.

Offer-to-start continuity

13. Transparent offers with early accommodations

Transparency improves acceptance rates and reduces early attrition. This is why it’s important to share pay bands, shift expectations, and growth pathways upfront. You should also capture accommodation needs pre-start to avoid miscommunications. At the end of the day, candidates from underrepresented groups are more likely to decline offers when expectations are unclear.

14. No-show prevention

Finally, provide your chosen candidate with a document checklist, device-friendly forms, and proactive check-ins at the 48 and 24 hour marks before their start date. If you don’t hear back from the check-ins, investigate immediately. Most day-one no-shows are the result of unclear instructions and/or inaccessible forms. As such, they’re almost always preventable.

Diversity recruiting strategy accelerators

You want to hire diverse candidates as quickly as possible. Good news: These three tools will help you implement the diversity recruiting best practices above in record time:

• Templates library: Build a library of inclusive job description templates, interview question sets for important competencies, post-interview feedback scripts, and SLA playbooks. These documents will make hiring for different backgrounds repeatable.
• Enablement capsules: Create a 10-minute video to teach managers how to make structured decisions. Then give them a one-pager that explains bias interrupters. Your team doesn’t need another diversity training workshop. It needs practical tools.
• Ops rituals: Run a weekly 20-minute review on four metrics—completions, show-ups, conversions, and equity. Then agree on one fix and ship it within seven days. Operational discipline beats good intentions, especially in terms of workplace diversity.

How to measure best practices for diversity recruiting

Is your diversity hiring strategy working? You won’t know until you measure your results. The seven metrics below will give you data to improve your approach:

• Completion rate: Tracks the percentage of candidates who start and finish an interview. Low completion could signal access problems or unclear expectations.
• Time to first interview: Measures how quickly candidates move from the application to their first assessment. Speed creates momentum and prevents candidate churn.
• Show-up rate: Captures the number of scheduled candidates who attend. Poor show-up rates usually indicate communication gaps or inflexible scheduling issues.
• Stage conversion: Reveals the percentage of candidates who advance from interview to offer, and from offer to start date. Tracking where you lose people will tell you exactly where your process breaks down. Then you can focus on specific fixes.
• Representation by stage: Monitors demographic diversity at each hiring step, with alerts for adverse trends. This will tell you if certain groups disproportionately drop off, so you can intervene immediately rather than discovering the problem in quarterly reports.
• Candidate sentiment: Measures how interviewees feel about your process, even when declined. NPS scores predict whether candidates will reapply or recommend you to others. As such, they’re critical for connecting with more diverse candidates.
• Manager SLA adherence: Tracks whether hiring managers review candidates within set time frames. Delays harm diversity initiatives and prevent a more inclusive culture.

Pitfalls that quietly sabotage diversity hiring practices

You’re working hard to connect with diverse candidates. Unfortunately, these five common mistakes can undo even well-intentioned efforts—avoid them!

• Resume-first triage: This process optimises for proximity to privilege, not competency for the role. As such, it reintroduces bias and kills completion rates.
• Fragmented variants by region or store: This mistake leads to inconsistency and poor measurement. Instead, standardise core steps and only flex communications.
• Email-only comms for frontline roles: SMS is essential for time-sensitive steps. If you only send candidates emails, a portion of your audience will miss your messages.
• Opaque scoring: This process encourages hiring managers to revert to proxies. After all, they don’t have rubrics and rationales to make increasing diversity a priority. 
• No feedback loop: Declines without context damage your employer brand and poison your future pipeline. This mistake keeps diverse employees from reapplying.

Sapia.ai’s role in diversity recruiting strategies

Sapia.ai operationalises diversity hiring at scale via mobile, chat-based, asynchronous interviews at the point of application. Our platform then uses blind, rubric-based scoring to measure candidate skills and ensure every hiring decision is explainable.

After chats, hiring teams receive ranked shortlists with clear competency evidence. Sapia.ai even sends expiry-aware reminders and allows for self-scheduling to reduce no-shows.

Plus, our platform uses AI to deliver accurate post-interview feedback to all candidates. This helps build goodwill between brands and job seekers and increases re-apply intent.

Last but not least, Sapia.ai is equipped with powerful analytics dashboards to track completions, show-ups, conversions, and representation by stage. As such, our platform gives you the data you need to spot adverse trends early and intervene before they compound.

Book a demo of Sapia.ai to see our industry-leading solution in action.

A vendor checklist for your diversity and inclusion recruitment strategy

When evaluating tools, ask vendors to demonstrate seven capabilities.

• Show apply-to-interview trigger and mobile preview. Confirm the experience works in all scenarios. That way you’re not surprised by any shortcomings.
• Prove blind, rubric-based scoring and shortlist rationale. Ask how the system prevents identifiers from influencing decisions that impact diverse hiring.
• Walk through reminders, scheduling, reschedules, and no-show prevention. High-volume processes need automation that can adapt to candidate behaviour.
• Confirm feedback-for-all guardrails and templates. Universal feedback should be standard, not optional, as it greatly improves the candidate experience.
• Demonstrate equity reporting by stage and location with adverse trend alerts. This detailed information will help you take action on your metrics.
• Explain overlay integration with ATS, SSO, data residency, and WFM/calendar connectors. The best tools fit into existing tech stacks rather than replacing them.
• Share time-to-value, admin load, and change enablement plans. Adoption risk kills good tools. Confirm that the vendor understands successful change management.

Hire more diverse talent

Diversity recruiting strategies that work in high-volume contexts create immediate progress, fair evaluation, and constant communication between you and your candidates.

An interview-first approach is the best way to operationalise inclusion. Why? Because the process treats every candidate with dignity, uses evidence instead of proxies, and builds a diverse and inclusive workplace through repeatable systems, not slick slogans.

When implementing an interview-first approach, start small. Pilot one role in one region. Measure completion, show-up, conversion, and representation. And scale when you prove lift.

Sapia.ai can help. Book a demo to see our platform’s interview-first approach in your tech stack.

FAQs about diversity hiring strategies

About Author

Laura Belfield

Head of Marketing