home Library Blog

December 9, 2025

Diversity sourcing: 7 tips for an unbeatable hiring strategy

14min

Understand skills-based hiring

Ioana Andrei

With diversity initiatives under fire from political parties and corporates alike, it‘s easy to forget the hard stats.

For example, companies with gender and ethnic diversity in leadership outperform less diverse companies financially by almost 40% [1].

You might be convinced that building diverse teams is the fair and profitable approach, but pure intentions don‘t solve hiring problems. Screening candidates fairly once applications are in is one part of it. But you can’t build a truly diverse team without optimizing how you source your applicants.

That means making your workplace attractive to a diverse range of workers – and putting in the legwork to reach out to individuals who may otherwise not find your job spec.

It may sound like extra work, but when your innovation and staff satisfaction rates hit the roof, you‘ll be laughing all the way to the bank. Just don‘t make it “a compliance exercise” or bureaucratic “HR work,” says Flavilla Fongang, CEO of Sixth Hive. “Make it a business strategy.”

Why? Because, far from “lowering standards,” sourcing diverse candidates leads to “new ideas, fresh perspectives, and [...] stronger results,” Stefan Stojanovic, Digital Silk‘s Director of Recruitment, tells us.

The business case for diversity sourcing and hiring is there. In this article, I’ll explain how to apply straightforward strategies to make it happen.

Why traditional sourcing doesn‘t impact diversity

Traditional sourcing – where you share job requirements, shortlist resumes, score interviewees, and make offers – doesn‘t automatically create diverse teams. Here’s why:

Human bias. Consciously or not, hiring teams sometimes create hiring cycles without diverse candidates in mind. Subtle signals – from photos on careers pages to how interviews are run – can unintentionally limit the pool of candidates who feel the role is meant for them.
Exclusionary requirements and language. Criteria such as advanced degrees can discourage skilled applicants who took different career paths or didn’t have access to traditional academic routes. Even certain phrasing in job descriptions – such as gendered terms like “competitive,” which can be off-putting to women – can cause some candidates to self-exclude.
Overreliance on broad platforms. Posting your job on major platforms like LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter, and Monster brings you quantity but not necessarily equity. These sites cast a wide net but don’t persuasively advertise jobs to underrepresented groups. Some groups, such as people with disabilities, may not even be on there.

7 tips to source diverse teams: Expert-backed strategies

After hearing from six diversity sourcing experts and based on my own DEI research over more than seven years, here are the inclusive strategies that deliver results.

Make your employer USP inclusive

Your USP – or unique selling point – is what sets you apart from other companies competing for similar talent. An inclusive USP clearly answers the question “Why would I work here?” before underrepresented candidates even apply.

But how? Fongang, who built a career network for Black professionals, tells me that “psychological safety and authenticity” are paramount. “Candidates want environments where they can lead as themselves, not code-switch, not shrink, not dilute their identity.” She also suggests spotlighting “progression, visibility, and stretch opportunities.”

Performative DEI falls flat, however. What you promise, you must deliver. Uku Soot, Organizational Growth Strategist at IPB Partners, mentions a client who “hired a more diverse team," but didn‘t “focus on creating a more inclusive environment.” As a result, the new team members didn’t feel "valued, included, and connected to the rest of the team".

Instead, here’s how to embed your USP into day-to-day business practices, based on advice from Fongang and Soot:

Access to mentorship: Implement regular, structured check-ins to track career goals, upskilling, and any issues in the team or workplace.
Equitable promotion: Offer promotions and cross-team role changes, with clear steps for progression, while deterring favoritism.
Clear leadership visibility: Showcase above-and-beyond results to senior management, no matter the employee‘s background or level of seniority.
Top-down messaging: Offer clear, consistent leadership support for tolerance and inclusion, including addressing discriminatory behavior.

Use creative search queries

Outbound sourcing requires researching and reaching out to qualified candidates. It‘s a more expensive, but also more rewarding, sourcing strategy, leading to six times [2] more hires than inbound applications (where you don‘t invite candidates to apply).

And it‘s especially useful when you‘re building a more diverse pipeline, because some underrepresented groups may not have access to your job ad or may self-select out. For example, recent Harvard Business School research shows that women are more likely than men not to apply to roles because they think they‘re underqualified.

So, if your talent pool is looking out of balance, hit the search bar on candidate sites like LinkedIn (general), Wellfound (startups), FlexJobs (remote work), or Behance (creatives).

Now, it may be tempting to use search filters such as job title, location, and industry to create a “diverse” shortlist based on names and profile photos. But you cannot reliably determine race, disability, or other identifying factors from these alone. There‘s also a risk of tokenism – singling out a “token” minority candidate just to tick a box.

Here‘s an alternative for finding outstanding underrepresented talent using a search bar.

Start by researching awards, fellowships, universities, or other programs for specific communities – for example, Historically Black Colleges or Universities (HBCUs) or LGBTQ+ marketing awards. A quick Google search or genAI prompt can help.
Use filters like Education, Groups, and Causes, and try Boolean searches (with AND/OR) to narrow your candidate list. Test multiple combinations, since not all profiles list every skill or affiliation.
Search across 2–3 platforms – such as a major job board, an industry-specific site, and one for niche communities. Once you’ve shortlisted candidates, you can choose 1–2 platforms to send outreach messages.

Example inclusive Boolean search query for a software engineer role

(“software engineer” OR “developer” OR “backend” OR “full-stack”)

AND (“fellowship” OR “scholarship” OR “bootcamp” OR “award”)

AND (“CodePath” OR “Ada Developers Academy” OR “HBCU” OR “Women Who Code”)

Keep sourcing even when not actively hiring

Flavilla Fongang says that a diverse applicant pool requires “build[ing] relationships before you need to hire.” Qualified candidates might prioritize applying to a trusted competitor if they only hear about your employer brand when your job ad pops into their inbox.

As Fongang puts it, rather than showing up “once a year,” you should engage “consistently in diverse professional ecosystems.” Milos Eric, General Manager at OysterLink, says his team “show[s] up where other voices have already assembled, community groups, smaller professional groups, events in our town.”

To build this kind of long-term trust within diverse communities, you can:

Create meaningful content on inclusion, such as social media posts related to affinity group work at your firm.
Exchange contact details with potential candidates online and offline – for example, via LinkedIn direct message or at industry events.
Plan how you’re going to update sourced talent about job opportunities – for instance, via automated newsletters or personalized one-to-one emails.

Finally, add some of the HR grandmother‘s secret sauce – passive candidate sourcing. There are twice as many passive candidates as active ones, and a UK study found that their performance is 9% stronger, too. That’s to say, develop professional relationships with top performers who aren’t actively looking, even when you’re not actively looking. Your paths may cross down the line.

Go beyond job boards and LinkedIn

In 2018, I attended a hackathon for women founders with startup ideas. It was a supportive, well-run environment, and a few months later, I was running an entrepreneurship training program with paying customers.

The premise is the same, whether it’s entrepreneurship or seeking a new job. Give diverse talent a task, an environment, peers, and resources – all catered to their specific needs – and you won‘t just identify top performers. You‘ll win their hearts, too.

Here‘s a mix of offline and online ways to engage specific candidate groups:

A disability-friendly hackathon with a relaxed schedule that includes existing employees
An offline thought leadership competition aimed at specific demographics, with an industry-relevant prompt
A meet-the-team informal day for job seekers without higher education

Partner with professional affinity groups

Professional affinity groups already have relationships with underrepresented candidate groups within your company. Some exist specifically to link their members to career opportunities, while others operate around shared interests, goals, education, or networking.

Here‘s a handful of online and offline communities to think about:

Job boards for specific identity groups (e.g., Hire Black Now, Workplace Diversity)
Sector-specific networking communities (e.g., Women in Finance, Black Girls Code)
Education and training institutions (e.g., HBCUs, intensive online coding bootcamps)

Once you identify relevant partners in your industry, roles, and company values, you can partner with them on shared projects (such as events or apprenticeships) or directly advertise your open positions to members.

For instance, Gor Gasparyan, CEO at Passionate Agency – Passionates, runs monthly two-hour resume and portfolio clinics with affinity groups, including Out in Tech, an LGBTQ+ tech community. This, Gasparyan told us, “yields 10 to 20 qualified warm leads per recruiter every quarter.”

De-bias your application process

Minimizing human bias in the application process doesn‘t just ensure that sourced candidates progress equitably. It also impacts sourcing itself. Candidates from communities that are more prone to experiencing bias may see anti-bias guardrails and think, “I‘ll have a fair shot here.”

As a counter-example, Nate Shalev, who founded inclusion consultancy Revel Impact, described receiving fewer job callbacks after adding “they/them” pronouns to their resume in 2023. They added that “most of the companies [...] had a diversity statement on their website,” suggesting that PR alone doesn’t lead to inclusive sourcing.

Instead, here are some modern ways to de-bias your hiring process, based on recommendations from Stefan Stojanovic and Uku Soot:

Job descriptions: Bin phrases (“Java wizard”) and requirements (“Master's in a related field”) that could dissuade applicants from underrepresented groups.
Resumes: Adopt blind screening methods, including removing names and identifying information.
Interviews: Lead structured interviews with well-defined score cards and require written feedback from interviewers.
Offers: Build compensation packages that match those of employees with similar responsibilities in your business.

Here, tech helps you follow through on policies. For example, many applicant tracking systems (ATSs) let you screen anonymized resumes and check industry salary ranges for specific roles. Tools like Gender Decoder can scan your job description for gender-biased wording.

And then there are cutting-edge methods like conversational AI interviews. TestGorilla lets you set interview questions, customize the candidate experience, and manually review the AI‘s automated evaluation of candidate answers. This is an extra layer of de-biasing your hiring, and one study found that 78% of candidates prefer AI to human interviews.

You can check out how TestGorilla‘s AI interview tool works with a pre-recorded product tour.

Follow the data

Track applicant demographics per hiring source to glean:

Which sourcing channels convert specific applicant demographics (for instance, by gender, race, and religion)
How specific departments and job types attract minority candidate groups after sourcing changes
Where underrepresented candidates drop in the hiring funnel (for instance, pre-interview vs. pre-offer)

According to Fongang, it‘s especially useful to track “the health of your pipelines, leadership mobility, interview consistency, and the measurable outcomes of your sourcing activity.” For example, the latter could be response rates to outbound messages and interview-to-offer ratios per demographic category.

Survey your current workforce regularly, too (annually, for instance). Make entries anonymous and ask for people‘s demographics, plus their satisfaction with the following DEI practices:

Leave policies, including sick leave and parental leave
Safety and belonging at work
How management handles interpersonal conflict or long-term illness

As you analyze employee surveys and ongoing sourcing data, look for patterns that lead to clear, actionable rules.

For example, Nicola Leiper, Director and Head of Project Management at Espresso Translations, says that her firm benefits from the “two in the finalist slate rule.” This is when you aim for at least two candidates from the same underrepresented background (e.g., no college degree) to avoid tokenism toward a specific finalist.

Elsewhere, Gor Gasparyan found that incentivizing referrals from outside employees‘ own education and former employer networks boosted underrepresented referrals by 20% in eight weeks. (The incentive was $1,500 per successful referral, if you were wondering.)

Test job-relevant skills early on

I can partly see where some of the criticism of diversity quotas comes from. If companies set quotas in a performative way while hiring underqualified candidates – who then don’t get enough support – that can backfire. But you can set targets, such as Nicola Leiper‘s two-finalist-slate rule, and still hire top-performing candidates.

And you do that through skills testing.

As Gasparyan tells us, “Grading actual work prior to any resume assessment is the unlock,” reducing “halo and affinity bias.” (These are types of favorable bias, based on positive candidate traits that aren't relevant to the role, and life experiences that the interviewer identifies with, respectively.)

Multi-measure skills testing, specifically, helps you identify top-qualified candidates quickly and reliably, while signaling to prospective applicants that you prioritize ability over background.

TestGorilla, for instance, offers 350+ tests across categories such as cognitive ability, programming, role-specific skills, and more. So, a product manager assessment, say, might include UX research, attention to detail, communication, and product management tests.

You can send custom assessments to your applicants and tap TestGorilla‘s already-assessed pool of 2+ million candidates.

The best insights on HR and recruitment, delivered to your inbox.

Biweekly updates. No spam. Unsubscribe any time.

Less wishful thinking and more strategy → fair, efficient hiring

Good intentions are a great place to start, but they won‘t shape a balanced, diverse workplace on their own. If you want to offer your staff a sense of fairness, belonging, and growth, you may need to tinker with your hiring process.

A strong diversity sourcing strategy, in particular, impacts which candidates progress through the process and how job seekers perceive your employer brand. Expert-vetted tips include making your employer USP inclusive, using creative outbound searches, and partnering with affinity groups.

Also, use bias-free tech to increase speed and accuracy. TestGorilla‘s AI sourcing and interviewing platform helps you prioritize skills, not background.

Try TestGorilla for free today or get a free live demo with our specialist team.

Sources