- The pandemic and the Great Resignation have fueled a war for talent among small-business owners.
- Many employers have also recently made stronger commitments to DEI in their hiring processes.
- Here's how entrepreneurs can prioritize DEI in their hiring.
- This article is part of Talent Insider, a series containing expert advice to help small business owners tackle a range of hiring challenges.
Entrepreneurship has blossomed in the pandemic — more than 11 million new business applications were filed between January 2020 and July 2022, according to the US Census Bureau. And millions of people have left their jobs in the Great Resignation, creating a war for talent among business owners.
Additionally, many employers have made stronger commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion in their hiring processes, stemming from a greater awareness of and desire to address racial injustice in the US. But it continues to be a challenge for both large and small companies.
Janice Gassam Asare, a racial-equity consultant, told Insider that small-business owners looking to hire employees from underrepresented populations face more difficulty than bigger firms. She added that many entrepreneurs are operating without HR departments and often have tight deadlines and smaller budgets for recruiting.
Asare and Suzanna Cameron, who founded the florist shop Stems Brooklyn in New York, shared their advice on how small-business owners can prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion in hiring.
Avoid networking bias by expanding your outreach
Asare said that unconscious bias affects the recruiting process for both startup founders and corporations. She added that if you're in charge of hiring and are white or white passing, you could be more inclined to hire someone who looks like you.
"You need to get as many people from different backgrounds involved in the hiring process as possible, but for small businesses that's not always possible," she said, adding that some founders work alone or use a contractor to source talent.
For business owners using recruiting websites, Asare cautioned that these platforms might not offer a wide range of candidates from underrepresented backgrounds.
"There's a networking bias since we're more likely to be connected with people who look like us," Asare said. "With some of my clients, they find less diverse candidates when they're looking on a site like LinkedIn."
Asare recommended small-business owners use sites like Jopwell, a career-advancement platform for Black, Latinx, and Native American job seekers.
She also encouraged founders to tap online communities when looking for candidates in specific industries. For example, if you need legal counsel, consider reaching out to networks representing Black lawyers.
Use Instagram to reach a more diverse audience
Cameron said that as a white female business owner, she wasn't aware of what diversity and inclusion in hiring truly meant when she started her small business 10 years ago. She said that in 2018 she took a closer look at the people who were applying for jobs at her store and noticed they were predominantly white women.
Bureau of Labor Statistics data indicates that in 2021, about 77% of floral designers were women, and about 77% were white. Cameron said she sought to support people from marginalized groups interested in becoming florists.
"The first step is to assess why you want to be inclusive in your business and hiring practices," Cameron said, adding that she wants people of all backgrounds to be able to pursue a career in floristry if that's their dream.
This spring, Cameron and her team started advertising open positions on Instagram, where Stems Brooklyn's account has a little more than 21,000 followers. Before, they had relied on recruiting through word of mouth and finding candidates who lived in the immediate neighborhood.
Cameron said the new strategy gave the business a wider audience to find potential hires.
"Once I started peeling back the layers of how the business as a whole could interact with the community, it started attracting a different crowd," she said. One hire out of the nine people she employs was found through the platform.
Rethink qualifications
Cameron said she also changed the qualifications in her job postings — for example, she reduced the years of experience required in hopes that this would encourage more people to apply.
"As a business, we require people to have a lot of experience, because what we're doing is pretty advanced in terms of design mechanics," she told Insider. "My thinking was that we could bring on people who have less experience in order to be more inclusive."
She said that while this means she and her team have to put in more effort to train new hires, it's worth it. "It's a small price to pay considering I benefit from white privilege, so spending the extra time to make sure I can train people is really important to me," she said.