Australia has hit 30% female representation at ASX 200 board level. However, just 8% of businesses have the tools in place to measure D&I policy efficacy.
Experts have express concern that a lack of quantitative data will hamper genuine progress.
Diversely, the AI-driven, bias-free hiring tools for businesses looking to attract more diverse talent, announced availability to companies in Australia and around the world.
Workplace Diversity & Inclusion with Diversely
Diversely was set up to address the huge pressure on businesses over the last 18 months to comprehensively tackle their D&I approaches, a space whose worldwide marketplace size is expected to be $313 million and growing, up from a $100 million in 2019.
Despite the upward trend in spend with a 60% jump in the number of employees with D&I in their titles on LinkedIn, trends are emerging around the lack of data to measure the current and future effectiveness of policies, practices and approaches by companies and individuals.
Helen McGuire, CEO and Co-founder of Diversely, sees these issues on a daily basis.
“Whilst the will to make a change is there, only a small percentage of businesses we speak to have any way of tracking, measuring or assessing the outcomes of their efforts in hiring.”
“Data we collected ahead of launching our D&I dashboard showed that only 8% of our potential clients have any tools, targets or strategies to attract diverse talent to their company and only 20% have any way to quantitatively track whether their hiring policies are working.”
According to the ASX 100, 31.8% of all seats are held by women. This drops down to 22% in the ASX 201-300, but solutions that help to improve approaches and quantify which attempts are working are lagging behind, with few specialist providers across the entire space.
Diversely stakeholders’ comments
“Without an understanding of D&I ROI, how will a business prove that their spend is worthy? Our frustration around the lack of impactful, globally scale-able solutions that offer a data and analytics approach to diverse hiring inspired the launch of Diversely,” said Helen McGuire.
“We’ve created a D&I dashboard and bias-free hiring tools with support from the University of Nottingham. It assesses, tracks and improves a business’ approach to attracting under-represented talent across five diversity elements.”
The SaaS solution is already being trialed by HR and talent teams in more than 20 firms around the world and is available on a subscription basis to help businesses overcome inequality in the make-up of their workforces and track against their D&I hiring goals.
Foodpanda’s Lynette Pathy said, “We strive for a workforce that is a fair representation of the communities we operate in. Diversely helps us to deliver equal opportunity to all talent.”
Accela Recruitment Services Client Lead Alexandra Plowman said, “A diverse workforce is key to success, not only for us but for our clients. We use Diversely to hire without bias.”
“Diversely provides an integrated solution to issues around diverse hiring. We use hard data, measurement and an improved approach to solve the issues of accountability and estimations in hiring,” concluded Diversely’s Co-founder and Chief Product Officer, Hayley Bakker.
