Welcome

Welcome to Principles of Equitable Recruitment, an online resource for our employment partners involved in the hiring process.

To have a strong, sustainable, and successful future, the University of Guelph encourages organizations and companies to recruit and hire individuals who will help students in our co-op and career partnership reach their full potential. The University of Guelph believes that a company’s full potential can only be realized when they have a workforce that reflects the rich diversity of our communities.

Building a diverse and equitable workforce is essential to an organization’s success. That’s because our constantly changing, and increasingly diverse environment puts complex demands on employers and companies to be competitive and more innovative, while developing and building an engaged workforce.

We know that Equity, Diversity and Inclusion is directly connected to an organization’s ability to succeed, to reach more innovative endpoints, and cultivate a better working environment. Therefore, it is vital that we understand the barriers and biases that prevent us from reaching the diversity we know we need to build a successful future. Applying an equity and inclusion lens to recruitment and selection allows us to identify those biases and barriers, address them, and ensure that the candidates you recruit and select are representative of the world around us.

Introduction

In this online resource, we will discuss the context for equity, diversity, and inclusion; examine unconscious bias and how it manifests; and provide a series of suggested steps and best practices that every hiring committee can undertake to bring an equity and inclusion lens to the recruitment and selection process. Each route will be examined in detail, along with strategies to minimize bias at every step of the process.

This online resource explores the following steps in detail:

• Plan your Recruitment Process: Create a diverse hiring committee and ensure that every member of the hiring committee completes (or has completed) this training resource.
• Reflect on Individual and Group Biases: Identify and examine, individual unconscious biases within the staff hiring process.
• Assess the Diversity Climate: Assess the diversity climate in your department and ensure you have a complete picture of your diversity gaps before posting your position.
• Construct the Job Posting: Construct the position description and review for biased or coded language.
• Construct the Hiring Rubric and Embed EDI Criteria in your Recruitment Process: Before reviewing resumes/CVs, construct a hiring rubric, discuss what an “ideal” candidate would look like on every hiring metric, and use that hiring rubric to both review and evaluate candidates after interviews. Include tools that enable you to assess the EDI competencies of your candidates. If there is no hiring team, collect feedback from members within the company to ensure you are honouring EDI hiring best practices.
• Post the Job Ad: Post the position on job boards targeting candidates from equity-deserving (underrepresented) groups and engage in targeted networking to ensure a diverse shortlist.
• Review Applications: Use your hiring rubric to evaluate your applications to reach a shortlist.
• Conduct Interviews: Conduct interviews with an equity lens and ask EDI-related questions of your candidates.
• Engage in Final Selection Process