ALC - CareerArc blog

2022 may have been a crazy year for recruiting—the Great Resignation finally seeming to dwindle down, big tech initiating mass layoffs—but it was also a year in which many companies embraced new recruiting trends to stay competitive in an ever-dynamic recruiting space. And so, as the year comes to a close, we decided to ask leaders in the space what the top trends they saw defining the recruiting space in 2022 were.

There’s a reason so many companies are trying to figure out how to recruit diverse candidates. Studies show that companies with gender diversity in their executive-level positions are 25% more likely to experience above-average profitability, with 30% women in their executive-level positions are more likely to outperform than those with less women, and with ethnic and cultural diversity are 36% more likely to be more profitable.

There are a lot of reasons why hiring diverse talent is important. It vastly improves performance, for starters. It’s one of the top things today’s candidates are looking for. And, as today’s workforce gets increasingly more diverse, the need for optimized hiring practices to attract diverse talent is increasingly essential.

Today, diversity in the workplace is widely understood as not only being ethically important but also beneficial to the overall success of a company. A 2018 Boston Consulting Group study even suggests that increasing the diversity of leadership teams leads to more innovation and improved financial performance.

As the world rapidly globalizes, the idea of diversity has become increasingly present in our lives. In fact, the Pew Research Center predicts that by 2055, “The U.S. will no longer have a single racial or ethnic majority.” It’s no surprise then that workplaces are growing more diverse and HR leaders are eager to know how to hire diverse candidates. 

The average American workplace today looks different than the workplace fifty years ago, and while progress has surely been made, developing a more diverse and inclusive workforce remains a challenge for most companies. And when we approach diversity in the workplace, we look at it through two primary lenses: inherent diversity and acquired diversity. Inherent diversity includes demographic characteristics like race, sex, and age. On the other hand, acquired diversity includes factors such as education, experience, values, skills, and knowledge. Both are important when tackling diversity recruitment.