We have launched a new series for our blog titled #ThreeTips. We are in search of Three Tips from our friends in the business community for their creative, actionable, and positive ideas about important topics in the employee experience.

In collaboration with Deepika Duggirala, Vice President of Engineering at Yello.

Hiring for diversity has become a bigger topic over the past couple of years among various industries. Employers are beginning to understand the importance of hiring for diversity and the great things that can come from it. Research shows that companies with a diverse workforce are 35 percent more likely to outperform those without diversity initiatives. VP of Engineering at Yello, Deepika Duggirala sat down with Holistic and gave us insight on hiring for diversity within her organization.

1. Prioritize diversity of thought and approach to problem solving. On many occasions, employers seem to only hire for diversity at the surface. Instead learning of the perspective and the approach a candidate may have to solving issues may be more beneficial than someone having the same background as you or similar. If you think about it, if we all had the same thought process or learned in the same manner, there is not much growth that comes from that. It’s important to count in other thoughts and perspectives, as someone may have an out of the box approach to a situation that, others may have missed.

2. Think about how the candidate’s differences can possibly benefit the company. Deepika talks about “culture-fit and culture-add”. Culture-fit being if someone fits into your culture due to the similarities they may possess, while culture-add delivers an emphasis on what a person can bring to the culture to help stimulate growth. It’s a great way to think about things and it goes back to diversity of thought, how can this person’s thinking help the business?

3. Be willing to listen to different point of views. We know most managers say they have an open door policy and may listen to concerns, but what action is being taken? It’s important for managers to be able to listen to different viewpoints without bias. Most times professionals are in their particular role for so long, and may feel as if they really do not need to hear much from anyone else, especially new or different. Yet, as we all know times are changing, especially in industries such as health, tech and beauty. It’s important to listen to other’s perspectives, proactively.

Hiring for diversity is important and crucial too many organizations today and their overall performance within different markets. There are many ideas that can go into hiring for diversity for improvement and there are many factors that go against the improvement as well. Holistic is designed to assist companies in building diverse, inclusive, vibrant workforces by using data and analytics to attract, retain, inspire, and motivate top talent.

Enjoy our content? Take a look at our library of #ThreeTips here.

Want to share your tips on this or another topic around the employee experience? We’d love to hear your thoughts!