Recruiting diverse candidates: Tips from diversity leaders at Microsoft, Vrbo, and Audible

1. Change starts from within

When you think of recruiting, it's easy to get so focused on outside candidates that you forget about the people already in your organization. But to successfully recruit diverse candidates, you need to look inside first. You need to build a culture that underrepresented talent wants to be a part of — and where they'll feel welcome.

As Jamy Barton, Sr. Director of Tech Diversity at Audible, put it: creating that authentic and inclusive culture makes reaching out to diverse talent so much easier.

2. Accountability is key

Whenever you set goals, you need a plan for holding people accountable to reaching them. Luci Gomes, then Global Director of Talent Acquisition at Microsoft, explained that they hold each hiring manager accountable for continuing to push their team — tracking where they were the year before versus where they are now, and where they want to go next year.

Transparency matters too. Microsoft has published its diversity numbers as a baseline to keep improving year over year and to hold everyone accountable to that progress.

Lyndsi McNaughton at Vrbo highlighted another accountability tool: a diversity scorecard. They use it to track goals over time, including employee experience and inclusivity (via survey results) and recruiting efforts — a breakdown of applicants, interviews, and hires by department.

3. Don't reinvent the wheel

Having spent the past year starting up a diversity hiring program at Audible, Jamy knows the temptation to start from scratch better than anyone. But she encourages people not to make the task harder than it needs to be. There are strong existing resources — like McKinsey's Diversity Matters Even More report — that you can use as references. Look at what's been done, use that to understand your organization's baseline, and then set and measure your goals from there.

4. It starts from the top down

Whether you want hiring managers to reach out to more diverse candidates or make your organization more inclusive overall, you need buy-in from senior leaders.

As Jamy at Audible said, they look to leadership to be role models for inclusion. How inclusive leaders are really matters — so measuring both their actions and intentions in that area is critical.

5. Get your whole team involved

Diversity recruiting efforts may start at the top, but they take off when the whole company plays a role. When all employees are encouraged and incentivized to tap their networks, the impact can be exponential — because people tend to associate with people who are similar to them. As your team becomes more diverse, so does their collective network.

An employee referral program is a great way to do this. Audible, Microsoft, and Vrbo all have referral programs that pay bonuses — and Microsoft and Vrbo offer higher incentives for diverse candidates.

As Jamy put it, recruiting teams work hard, but they need the partnership of everyone in the organization. The people actually in the roles you're recruiting for can speak to candidates and add a voice that recruiters can't.

6. Lean on employee resource groups

You don't need to rely exclusively on your recruiting team. Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) can do more than support inclusivity inside your organization — they can actively help you network with specific communities. A partnership between recruiting and ERGs works because the people in those groups can speak directly to their experience.

At Vrbo, Lyndsi explained that a lot of recruiting initiatives are driven by ERGs themselves in partnership with recruiting. Their Veterans Family and Friends ERG, for example, connects quarterly with veterans in the community — bringing them into their offices, showing them their space, and introducing them to hiring managers.

7. Think long term

Don't overlook passive candidates — people who aren't looking for a job right now but might be down the line. Just because someone doesn't apply the next day doesn't mean you shouldn't invite them to a networking event if you think they'd be a good fit.

At Microsoft, they use events to position the company as a career destination — whether that's tomorrow, a month from now, or whenever the candidate is ready.

PowerToFly co-founder Katharine Zaleski echoed this: events aren't about hiring someone the next day. In many cases, it's about building a relationship over time.

8. Give candidates a behind-the-scenes look

Skip the sales pitch. Think product demo. Opening up and sharing real examples of the work you're doing will engage talent in a way a 10-minute speech about how great you are never will. People want to know you value their time — and sharing something they couldn't have learned anywhere else is a great way to show that.

Katharine described it this way: what converts passive candidates over time is bringing them into the space and giving them a real look at the organization — whether that's an informal tech talk or an evening with a few product demos. Candidates leave with just enough knowledge to feel like they've been given something special.

9. Make job descriptions as inclusive as possible

Rather than specifying that you're looking for diverse talent — which raises legal concerns — focus on auditing the language you're using for bias, both explicit and implicit. The goal is for any qualified candidate who reads the posting to feel comfortable applying.

A lot of bias in language is implicit, and you may not realize that your wording is unappealing to a particular group. Microsoft and Vrbo both use Textio to check for and remove implicit bias from job posts. Microsoft has done this across every single one of their job descriptions — well over 10,000.

As Luci put it, they're not threading in diversity per se — they're removing language that was part of a problem they didn't even realize they had.

Jamy also recommends combing through your qualifications lists and questioning whether each bullet point is truly necessary. You don't want to deter a qualified candidate over a "nice to have" that you'd never actually require.

10. Research talent pools and meet candidates where they are

You need to do your research to understand where the candidates you're looking for actually are. Tools like TalentNeuron and the Bureau of Labor Statistics are a good place to start.

Luci explained that everything at Microsoft starts with research. They use multiple tools to figure out what the available talent market looks like — then gear their searches toward where there's the highest availability of technical talent. That includes encouraging hiring managers to look outside the typical cities and areas they'd normally target, and opening roles to be fully or partially remote, so they can be where the talent is rather than asking talent to come to them.

If you want more tips like these, be sure to watch the full webinar!

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