News & Insights

Articles and advice for job seekers and employers.

Building an Inclusive Finance Team: Best Practices

Team with diversity

Building an inclusive finance team promotes fairness, equity, and job satisfaction. These factors elevate creativity, problem-solving, and innovation.

Bringing together finance professionals with diverse backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives supports idea-sharing, development, and implementation. Sharing unique viewpoints and perspectives helps identify opportunities and risks that a homogenous team might overlook. The results include higher team morale, more accurate forecasting, and improved profitability.

Using targeted approaches to hiring, valuing, and promoting finance professionals strengthens team inclusion. The following best practices can help.

Foster an Inclusive Company Culture

An inclusive company culture values, respects, and celebrates employees’ differences:

  • Provide inclusive leadership training for managers and supervisors to stay open-minded and empathetically interact with employees.
  • Create employee resource groups (ERGs) to encourage networking, connection, and support for employees with common backgrounds.
  • Host lunch and learns, webinars, panel discussions, and other events that promote understanding and celebration of underrepresented groups.  

Attract Diverse Finance Talent

Broaden your candidate pools to attract diverse finance talent:

  • Partner with local colleges and universities to access finance students with diverse cultural backgrounds.
  • Network with professional associations to build relationships with diverse finance professionals.
  • Use finance-focused job boards to find candidates with diverse backgrounds.
  • Communicate your company’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) with bias-free job descriptions.

Follow Inclusive Hiring Practices

Fair hiring practices strengthen equitable evaluation of diverse candidates:

  • Develop and follow equal opportunity policies aligning with legal requirements and best practice recommendations.
  • Remove personally identifying details from resumes to objectively evaluate candidates.
  • Evaluate candidates on knowledge, skills, and abilities aligning with the role’s core competencies to minimize unconscious biases in candidate selection.

Conduct Objective Interviews

Identifying and addressing unconscious biases strengthens fair candidate evaluations:

  • Assemble a diverse interview panel to minimize biases in candidate evaluations.
  • Provide diversity training to help your hiring team understand the impact of unconscious biases on decision-making.
  • Use structured interviews with predetermined questions and a scoring rubric to support objective candidate evaluations.

Encourage Mentorship

Seasoned finance professionals can mentor newer finance professionals to support career advancement:

  • Experienced finance professionals can share their institutional knowledge, skill development opportunities, and career experiences to guide less experienced professionals.
  • Senior finance professionals can answer junior professionals’ questions and provide career advice and constructive feedback.
  • Seasoned finance professionals can sponsor newer professionals for advancement opportunities to strengthen employee retention.

Hire Diverse Finance Professionals

Partner with FiStaff to add diverse professionals to your finance team. Find out more today.

Share:

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn

Related Posts