The idea that companies can forego cultural diversity in their approach to product development and team building is likely no longer a viable option for most in today’s global marketplace. Moving toward a rich and complex organizational structure, most smart businesses are seeking talent with a diverse approach to creating new ideas and strategic problem-solving skills.
Many hiring managers are now faced with a deficit of Intellectual diversity in the workplace. Finding ways to increase their pool of diverse workers within the company hierarchy has become an essential requirement when sourcing new team players.
Why is Intellectual Diversity Important?
With the entire world moving closer to unity in all possible ways, it is important to imbibe a culture that boasts of diversity. Every employee brings with him/her not just a certain technical skill-set but also attributes that can enhance the overall experience of other people in your organization.
There’s more professional learning and personal development that comes to the table. The idea is to build a community that enhances each and every person’s experience at your organization, including your own. Including intellectual diversity in the workplace leads to acceleration in growth of your business.
It brings the whole world together on one platform. This means diverse experiences that can enrich your business with possibilities and opportunities you never actually thought of.
What is Intellectual Diversity?
Diversity is defined as both a person’s ethnicity or national identity as well as their intellectual diversity, the latter being the sought-after characteristic that companies look for.
Understanding what diversity means is a good first step. It’s the intellectually diverse employee who brings an innovative perspective to the table. Integrating and applying the ideas and concepts of employees belonging to a different background and culture help companies address a broader range of culturally diverse needs, and situations, while extrapolating a myriad of possibilities from them in their search for solutions.
Since intellectually diverse workers relate to or address problems from fresh perspectives, their ideas can then allow for radically different solutions or approaches than those envisioned by local, more culturally heterogeneous workers. Seeing work situations from a different slant can ultimately help companies find better, more flexible product solutions.
Problem-Solving Diversity
We all know there is no one way to solve a problem. Hiring intellectually diverse talent further helps you tackle individual problems in a holistic, comprehensive way. Working with a team with diverging cognitive perspectives provides a more thorough approach to achieving well-rounded, effective problem-solving solutions, possibly yielding a multi-faceted solution, one that might be unattainable if everyone on the team was, well, like-minded.
Birds of a feather may flock together but how will they ever know a beautiful new place exists if some of them never take a detour? Also, if they don’t allow other birds to join in, they will continue to go from A to B and back all their lives. There’s C through Z too that remains unexplored.
When a team embodies intellectual diversity, each member of the team conceives of or approaches a new dilemma or query in their own unique, innovative way, adding rich layers and nuances to developing or improving products in an entirely new light.
In creating complex IT software, for example, one team member’s idea might evoke another, and so forth, from which the team then elaborates or builds upon to envision and create a completely new solution leading to unique and profitable final products.
Hiring Practices and Approaches
Measuring intellectual diversity is complex and well yes, can be daunting, and some might say impossible. Here are some points to keep in mind to make the process a lot simpler:
- Do not simply fill a position but rather determine what your team’s assets are and what is missing or lacking, and expand on that.
- The challenge is that most hiring managers are overwhelmed by this task and would rather stay within their own comfort zones, resulting in near similar hires owing to the same hiring strategies when recruiting new employees. Stepping out of that hiring mindset to source and find intellectually diverse employees requires a little more effort and some “out of the box” thinking .
- Bringing diverse employees on board may catapult the company’s business to a whole new game-changing reality. Conversely, sticking to the same hiring practices and outcomes at best maintains the status quo, at worse, sets the company back and possibly leads to stagnation and loss.
Finding Intellectually Diverse Employees
Proactively envisioning your company’s recruitment practices, especially when searching for intellectually diverse talent might seem overwhelming- but there are unique recruitment services and agencies that can help with this daunting task. It just means shifting your mindset to new ways of hiring and looking for such employees beyond your local and even national market.
Finding workers with diverse intellectual abilities and backgrounds, who are also qualified and experienced makes it further complicated. This is one of the many reasons why most successful and innovative companies turn to specialty recruiting firms to find unique talent.
Not too many agencies offer this specific type of recruitment service that is capable of sourcing from a worldwide pool of intellectually diverse talent, a global assortment of culturally diverse remote workers from a wide array of geographical locations; full-time workers who bring with them imaginative, innovative ideas, together with solid work ethics, qualifications, skills, expertise and experience to the job.
DistantJob specializes in this type of recruiting, offering employers the possibility to hand pick top, intellectually diverse, remote employees from an extensive global pool of talent to satisfy the company requirements.
Try DistantJob, we’re confident we can find you the most talented remote workers to solve your company’s HR intellectually diversity needs. Contact us to add diversity to your team.
