How to Tell If a Company Really Values Diversity and Inclusion

How to tell an employer is diversity-friendly

4 min readAug 5, 2022

If you’re entering the job market and you’re thinking about what companies to apply to, you may wonder about the promises of diversity-friendly recruiting practices and workplaces that employers put out these days.

What exactly does a diversity-friendly employer look like? Jobseekers need a frame of reference to know what kind of standards to measure employers against. When you experience the recruitment process of employer, it can help to understand how diversity-friendly they really are.

Following are six examples of the kind of signs you should look for to determine where an employer stands on the diversity-friendliness spectrum.

A no-GPA-minimum policy

There’s been no study indicating a definitive link between a candidate’s grade point average and their actual performance at jobs. Yet, many employers make a point of preferring candidates with high GPAs. Minorities and other groups underrepresented in the workplace, however, tend to lose out in the GPA race. They often come from financially challenged backgrounds; they often need to work long hours to make their way through college, and end up with less impressive GPAs. For this reason, employers and recruiters committed to diversity tend to eliminate minimum GPA requirements.

A sensitive interview schedule

Many minority students come from low-income backgrounds and work full-time on the side to put themselves through college. Employers who aren’t sensitive to this reality of their lives, however, tend to schedule interviews at 10 a.m. or some other inconvenient time that requires candidates to take time off work or skip a class. Jobseekers from minority groups are likely to simply skip these companies because they can’t make it to their interviews. A diversity-sensitive employer sets interview schedules with work and class schedules in mind.