Many smaller businesses in Australia are struggling to fill vacancies and staff shortages are a huge issue for small businesses. And without workers, small businesses struggle to thrive.
Last year, the Diversity Council Australia released research that looked at how employers, big and small, across industries can tap into overlooked and underleveraged groups of workers who are ready and willing to work.
In a tight labour market and with high employment rates across the economy, 31 per cent of employers say they are struggling to fill positions. At the same time, we know there are 3,000,000 people who are looking for work or want more work.
Our inclusive recruitment guidelines are designed to help employers open up their recruitment practices to make sure they are reaching more and more potential candidates and future employees. We provide ways for employers who can not find staff to engage with more people who are looking for work.
Small businesses can do some simple things to be more inclusive in their search for employees. Doing so will open up your business to committed, dedicated and skilled people, ready to work.
Using inclusive recruitment also helps to bring diversity to your staff, and diversity and inclusion is good for business.
Inclusive Recruitment – some basics for small business:
- Value diversity: Make it a priority to consider diversity when you employ people. People with different experiences and backgrounds bring different benefits to your business.
- Understand bias and how it might limit your business: Your ideal candidate may not be the only person who would be great at the job.
- Enable diverse applicants through your processes: advertise in different places and ways and make application processes flexible, easy, accessible and appropriate for the roles. Doing things differently may bring different (and diverse) people to you.
Remember today’s dream employee may have been last month’s “imperfect” applicant. Different from what you anticipated doesn’t mean deficit, it could be an opportunity to work differently/creatively
or in unexpected ways.
Inclusion is good for business too
DCA’s Inclusion@Work Index showed the incredible impact that inclusion can have on people and culture, showing that workers in inclusive teams are:
- four times less likely to leave their job in the next 12 months
- 10 times more likely to be very satisfied
- 11 times more likely to be highly effective than those in non-inclusive teams
- 10 times more likely to be innovative
- six times more likely to provide excellent customer service
- four times more likely to work extra hard.
Small businesses can benefit from diversity and inclusion and Diversity Council Australia along with our more than 1200 members – employers large and small from across Australia and across the economy are building in diversity and inclusion to all. They do not because it’s no longer a “nice to have” but because it brings proven benefits. We think of diversity and inclusion as a superpower because it delivers wins for all.
