To help firms maximize their approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion, LinkedIn on Thursday announced new prompts within LinkedIn Recruiter that will make hiring professionals aware of how they don't include enough diversity in gender.
It's calling them Diversity Nudges. The new prompts alert managers to an imbalance and recommend a way to expand the candidate search to correct that imbalance.
"This will be especially helpful for managers at smaller firms," said LinkedIn.

If your representation of gender in one talent pool is skewed, you will get a pop-up notification with the Male/Female ratio for search. Recommendations of Skills, Locations, and Companies filters that can be added to search to improve gender balance are also provided. For example, in the case of an electrical engineer, Diversity Nudges might say: Add data analysis, add analytic skills, and add Simulink to "increase representation of women electrical engineers in search candidates."

This would be one way, at least, to make recruiters more aware of these and encourage a bit more thinking and talk around the issue in the hiring process.

Of course, roles should always be rewarded based on merit, but there is a growing pool of research that shows that increasing gender diversity can lead to better outcomes for all types of organizations, while also ensuring greater opportunity for a wider breadth of people through the recruitment process.

While the right mix can be challenging to sustain, as you simply cannot make people apply, perhaps the small 'nudges,' like this will start to divert your focus on how you recruit, and how you may enlarge your candidate pool regarding some of these key elements.

The new feature builds off existing prompts available, but LinkedIn is introducing a new means in which a company can elucidate on their values and organizational commitments.

"Organisations will be able to create a defined section on their Company Page detailing their commitments under the categories of DEI, Environmental Sustainability, Social Impact, Career Growth and Learning, and Work Life Balance."

On the 'About' page, companies will now be able to add an 'Our Featured Commitments' section to highlight an array of opportunities for reports, certifications, articles, videos, etc.
"Members can easily view these commitments and the documentation provided by each company to assess authenticity. Members will also be able to search for companies with relevant commitments in their job search."

That might well be another way through which a candidate can find work spatio-temporally matching some of her beliefs and concerns, thus finally helping to make their professional experience worthwhile.

Finally, LinkedIn is opening up several LinkedIn Learning paths related to diversity, equity, and inclusion for free to all members until September 8th.

Those learning paths include:

Recruit Diverse Talent and Promote Equitable Hiring
Manage Diverse and Inclusive Teams
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging for All
Create an Inclusive Work Culture
Within those learning paths, there are 24 individual DEI courses, which offer lots of key tips and learnings that will help you optimize your business process.

Add this to the 20 most popular LinkedIn Learning courses, which are free this month, and you have a wide range of ways to up your skills and knowledge, update your processes in line with evolving best practices.

The modern necessity to make your candidate pool wider can prove quite challenging in real life, as such, because historically speaking, this pattern has an inherent bias related to your earlier crowd. These new prompts could be a perfect addition to the process, raising awareness during the intake level and would be a great addition to the recruitment tool of LinkedIn.