Diversity sourcing strategy.

When a team decides its pipeline should look different, the first move is usually a new channel, such as another job board or a returnship partner. The new channel sends people, and the recruiters read them against the same role profile they used last quarter. If that profile still asks for a well-known previous employer and five unbroken years in the title, it screens out the people the channel was added to reach, and the shortlist comes back looking like the last one.

A diversity sourcing strategy has to change what you search for before it changes where you search. So I’d rewrite the profile first, rebuild the searches from it, add the channels the old profile would have ruled out, and fix the job post. The shortlist then shows whether it worked, once you read it by where each person on it came from. One rule holds through every step of the method below: every candidate who arrives, from any channel, is judged against the same criteria.

Audit the role profile for requirements that stand in for skills.

Start with the role profile, the document your recruiters search against and your reviewers read applications against. Each requirement in it decides who gets found at all. Find the requirements that only predict a skill, and replace them with the skill.

Read every must-have and ask what it’s there to predict. A degree from a top-ranked school is a bet that someone learns hard material quickly, and five years in the title is a bet that they’ve met the problems this role brings. They’re fair bets that also rule out people who have the skill and got it another way:

Next, write the outcome before the skills: ask the hiring manager what the hire must have done by the six-month mark, then list the skills that produce it and the evidence you’d accept for each one.

For a customer success role, “five years at a software company, degree required” becomes “has kept a group of accounts renewing, and can walk through one account they turned around, including what they changed.” The rewrite gives whoever reads the applications something to look for, where the original only let them check a date range and a degree.

Take the list to the intake call, so the hiring manager settles each requirement before anyone searches:

Build searches from the skills in the new profile.

A rewritten profile changes little until the searches change with it, because a search string is the old profile written in shorthand. Rebuild each search from the skills, so your sourcing finds the people the profile now allows.

Look at the strings your recruiters run for the role. A search for the title at a list of named companies, or for a set of schools, puts back the requirements you just took out of the profile. Replace those terms with the work the profile now asks for, such as the systems someone built or the accounts they ran.

Titles need the same treatment, because the same work goes by different names at different companies. An implementation consultant can do much of the work a customer success manager does, under a title your old search never looked for. So keep a list of titles that do the job under another name, and add one each time a hire comes from outside the usual title.

Then run the new profile over the people you already hold. Past applicants and candidates you sourced for earlier roles were read against the old requirements, and some of them fit the new ones. That rerun goes faster when your hiring pool is kept current.

When you write to someone you found this way, lead with the work the role involves and why their background fits it. They may not see themselves in the title, so the message has to show them the match.

Add channels the old profile would have screened out.

New channels pay off once the profile and the searches stop filtering out the people they reach. Choose each channel for the people it reaches, and choose again for each role family:

• Professional communities and associations for the function, where people who do the work talk about it.
• Returnship programs, for experienced people coming back after a career break.
• Bootcamps and schools you’ve never recruited from, for people who learned the skill another way.
• Remote-eligible posts and regional job boards, for qualified people outside the cities you usually hire in.

Check each channel against the profile before you commit to it. A returnship partner is wasted on a profile that still rules out anyone with a gap in their work history, which is why the profile comes first.

Add one channel at a time for each role family, so you can tell which one produced the candidates who reached the shortlist. Keep one rule fixed while you add them:

Write the job post around what the hire will do.

The job post filters before anyone applies, because people read it and decide whether it describes them. Write it from the rewritten profile, so the people your new channels reach can see themselves in it.

Open with the work the hire takes on in their first six months, then name the three or four skills the profile now asks for.

Mark what’s required and what’s preferred, and keep the required list short. I think a long list of must-haves costs you applicants who could do the job, because each reader has to judge whether they clear every line, and some qualified people will decide they don’t.

Cut slang that describes a personality instead of the work. Then say what each interview covers and who a candidate can ask about accommodations, so the process reads as open to anyone with the skills.

Once applications arrive, the screen is the next place an old requirement can come back in. Screen against the rewritten lines, by hand or with AI resume screening, so the proxies you cut stay out. A practical guide to AI resume screening covers how to check the reasons it gives.

Where Metaview fits in a diversity sourcing strategy.

The method changes what your searches look for first, and that is where Metaview’s sourcing agent sits. You give AI Sourcing the role in one natural-language prompt. From that one prompt it hunts through the open web and through the candidates already in the applicant tracking system your team has connected, along with past Metaview conversations, and hands back candidates and explains why each one is there. Never include a protected characteristic in a search prompt. Everything after the list belongs to the recruiter, from reading those reasons to writing the first message.

Once a new channel’s applications arrive, each one needs the same read against the rewritten profile, including those a recruiter working in date order would never reach. Application Review places each application in a fit bucket and shows the reasoning, using the role’s ideal candidate profile as its measure. Your team edits and approves that profile before it’s used on a single application, and whether anyone moves forward is the recruiter’s decision.

Metaview captures every spoken word of the interviews your team records. So when someone from a returnship program or a bootcamp explains how they used a required skill, a recruiter can find those words again and read them against the profile line they answer. An interview is recorded only after the candidate has agreed to it through your team’s own consent process. The Metaview Notetaker then joins that interview as a participant everyone can see. It records the conversation, then transcribes it.

Metaview Reports can add a column for a detail you describe and fill it from every captured conversation. Describe evidence of a skill the profile requires, and you can read what each recorded candidate said about it side by side.

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1. 1The name of the new column, here “Compensation Expectations,” typed in by the team.
2. 2The column filled in for each candidate from what they said, with the interview it came from beside their name.
3. 3Two rows still loading while the column fills.

The same records show whether the skill came up in an interview at all. No single interviewer has to cover the whole profile:

Those small parts have to add up to the whole profile for every candidate. Reports shows how the questions were spread across interviewers and roles. A candidate who was never asked about a required skill was never assessed on it, and the old requirements fill that gap.

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1. 1Four competencies across the top, each cell counting the questions one interview asked on it.
2. 2The interview under each name, a “Recruiter Screen” for the first and a “Final Alignment” for the last, so each row is one candidate at one stage.
3. 3Down the “Collaboration” column, the count runs from one question to four, depending on the interview.

Check the loop for each candidate a new channel sent, and make sure every required skill gets asked, just as it is for everyone else.

Read the next shortlist by where each candidate came from.

Once one role has run through the new profile and the new channels, mark each name on its shortlist with the channel that brought that person in and the title they held. Then turn to the people your new channels sent who didn’t make the shortlist, and note why each was rejected.

Each of those reasons should be a line in the rewritten profile, with the evidence that line asks for. A reason the profile doesn’t contain means an old requirement is still being applied by hand, and whoever gave it is the person to sit down with before the next search opens.

Repeat that read on the next few shortlists in the role family, and keep the channels whose people reach the shortlist on the same criteria as everyone else. Then start the next search from the profile as that read left it, with each reason you couldn’t trace either written into it with its evidence or taken out.