One of Silicon Valley's greatest coaches, advisors, and mentors, William "Bill" Campell, used to say, "Invite new voices to the table..." when asked about hiring diverse teams.

Bill's teachings and principles for a diversified workforce live on in the book, "Trillion Dollar Coach."

Bill Campbell had a huge impact on Silicon Valley culture, having coached Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt, and Sundar Pichai at Google, Steve Jobs at Apple, Jeff Bezos at Amazon, Jack Dorsey and Dick Costolo at Twitter, and Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook.

Campbell believed that the key to building great teams was to invite a variety of perspectives to the table. By doing so, you open yourself up to new and innovative ideas. When everyone is thinking the same way, progress stalls. But when you have a mix of people with different backgrounds and experiences, you can push boundaries and achieve the impossible.

Inviting new voices to the table is not only the right thing to do from a diversity standpoint, but it's also good for business.

Diverse teams are proven to outperform homogenous ones.

But, diversity recruiting strategies are not one size fits all. The best way to approach recruiting diverse top talent is to start with understanding the needs of your business and mapping out where you would like to see diversity represented.

For example, if you're a tech company looking to recruit more women in engineering roles, you might consider partnering with organizations like Girls Who Code, a great resource for recruiting minorities and female engineers.

Diversity recruiting trends are always evolving, so it's important to stay up-to-date on the latest news and best practices.

One of the biggest trends since COVID has been the rise of virtual recruiting events. These events are a great way to reach a larger pool of diverse candidates who might not otherwise have the opportunity to connect with your company.

These virtual job fairs will offer companies looking to hire diverse teams access to great qualified candidates.

When it comes to building a great team, remember Bill Campbell's words of wisdom: "invite new voices to the table."

‍Interview intelligence platforms can also help you with sourcing and recruiting a more diverse range of candidates. By tracking which channels your most successful hires come from, you can better target your recruitment efforts to find even more talented individuals that fit your needs.

Diversity recruiting is an important part of building a great team, but it's not the only piece of the puzzle.

Diversity Recruiting Tools

There are many great diversity tools and techniques out there to help companies with their diversity recruiting strategy.

Start with a personal audit of your own unconscious bias. This is hard, we'd all love to think that we're completely inclusive in our decision-making, but realistically that's often not the case.

Harvard and Project Implicit have a great free test to get you started. Once you've taken this test, you'll have a clearer perspective of where you can improve.

Now that you've identified your own biases, it's time to get a complete understanding of your company's needs.

What is your diversity recruiting strategy going into the next quarter? Next year?

Do you have objectives that you'd like to achieve?

Share these objectives with your whole company so that they can partner with you, engage their networks, and determine what diversity tools will be required.

A job post audit is a great way to get started.

Job postings can often be exclusionary without meaning to be.

Language is important, and small tweaks can make a big difference. For example, using "she/her" instead of "he/him" throughout a job posting can help make it more inclusive to female candidates.

Once you've cleaned up your job postings, it's time to start thinking about where you can find the best qualified diverse candidates.

LinkedIn is a great place to start.

You can use LinkedIn's "Advanced People Search" feature to target candidates that meet specific criteria, like experience level, job title, location, and even skills without bias.

This search function is also great for finding diverse talent in hard-to-reach places.

For example, if you're looking for a software engineer in a small town, you can use LinkedIn's search function to find her.

Once you've found some qualified candidates, it's time to start the interview process!

Technology can help make the interview process more inclusive and prevent unconscious bias from creeping in.

Assembling the best recruitment tech stack can be overwhelming - from screening to interview intelligence software there are a ton of useful tools to help you build an efficient process. “How to Build the Best Recruitment Tech Stack” is a great ebook to walk you through each step!

Interview intelligence software uses data and analytics to help you make better hiring decisions.

This software can help you keep track of which channels your diverse candidates are coming from, how they're performing in the interview process, and which questions they're being asked most often.

This data is valuable for understanding where you might have bias in your process and for making changes to improve the fairness.

Diversity recruiting solutions like Pillar can help you identify great candidates that you may have otherwise missed.

‍Pillar's video interviewing platform offers a number of features that are designed to help reduce bias in the hiring process.

Inclusive Recruiting Strategies

Strategically, a diverse workforce gives you more perspectives to draw from when making decisions, helps you better understand and serve your customer base, and can give you a competitive edge.

That said, inclusive recruitment strategies are not always easy to put into practice. It can be difficult to find qualified diverse candidates, and even harder to assess them without bias.

That's where technology comes in.

Having an inclusive recruitment toolkit to serve as a resource for your team is a good start.

If your company is like many tech startups, you operate in the cloud on Google Workspace or in Microsoft 365’s ecosystem.

Giving your team access to inclusive recruitment checklists with examples of what to look for in candidates, job postings, and interview questions can help get everyone on the same page.

These checklists can help you avoid common mistakes, like using gendered language in job postings or asking leading questions in interviews.

Inclusive recruitment training is also a must to get everyone up to speed on the best practices for recruiting diverse talent.

Diversity and inclusion training should cover topics like unconscious bias, how to avoid common pitfalls, and where to find qualified candidates.

Finally, technology can help you automate some of the more time-consuming aspects of recruiting so that you can focus on finding the best candidates.

Interview intelligence software has become the primary way that startups automate their interview process.

This software can help you keep track of which channels your diverse candidates are coming from, how they're performing in the interview process, and which questions they're being asked most often.

This data is valuable for understanding where you might have bias in your process and for making changes to improve.