Target Diversity

Business-University Cooperation

(Start: 10/2014)

Companies who hire people with diverse backgrounds (gender, culture, age) are making a statement that they recognize that a diverse workforce is a pathway to societal well-being and business benefits. Through making the company attractive to people with different backgrounds, select recruitment activities will make it possible for companies to realize this diversity. Although matching jobs to already hired women and minorities is vitally important, communicating the availability of jobs to these groups during the recruitment process is even more essential and job advertisements are a key interface between the cooperation partner and future employees.

The overall goal of this “target diversity” project is to increase the application and hire rate of women at the cooperation partner’s business site in Tyrol.  More specifically, the project aims to identify possible biases in job advertisements and employment communication that discourage applications from women to positions at business site in Tyrol. After identifying possible biases, strategies can be developed for increasing applications from minority groups – both for local business site specifically and the cooperation partner more generally. The focus is on the application submission process (applicant drop-out during the later stages of the recruitment process is not addressed by this project).

The leaders of the business site, in cooperation with the HRM research group at the University of Innsbruck, seek to provide researched-based recommendations for HR practices to HR staff to enable the recognition of undesirable biases in job postings (and related activities in the recruitment process), to identify activities that encourage applications from qualified females in the workforce, and to support the cooperation partner in its goal to hire qualified women.