I’m piloting structured phone screens with a 1–5 “culture add” rubric and rewrote our job ads for skills-first clarity in Q4; our onsite slate diversity moved from 22% to 37% without slowing offers. What’s helped you widen pipelines beyond referrals — community partners, job boards, or process tweaks — and what would you skip next time?
Have you tried swapping the resume screen for a 10-minute blind work sample scored by two reviewers? It lifted our onsite diversity from 26% to 41% without slowing offers and pairs well with your 1–5 “culture add” screen; broad “diversity” job boards were mostly noise for us compared to targeted communities.
Quick example: we saw about 15% more non-referral candidates after hosting a monthly virtual “open recruiter hour” with HBCU alumni groups and Women Who Code, and guaranteeing a 48‑hour link to book the structured screen… Caveat: publish salary/scope in the invite and send calendar holds, or it’s crickets. Building on @jackson9772’s rigor, if you had budget for one partner, would you pick Jopwell (https://www.jopwell.com) or a local apprenticeship nonprofit?
What moved the needle for us was sending every applicant a 2‑page ‘what good looks like’ rubric and a few sample prompts 48 hours before the phone screen; pass‑through for nontraditional folks rose 18% without slowing offers — just keep the packet about expectations, not coaching. Worth trying alongside your culture‑add rubric?
One thing that worked: we added a no‑resume fast‑apply (4 must‑have questions) and auto‑sent a self‑serve calendar with evening/weekend slots; non‑referral pass‑through jumped and onsite mix improved without extra interview load. Small caveat: we kept it only after auditing those questions for bias with a partner like Year Up (https://www.yearup.org). Would you pilot the fast‑apply on one role first?
We piloted a 2‑week paid “preview project” with Year Up (https://www.yearup.org) and Per Scholas grads — one scoped task plus two manager office‑hours — and our onsite rate roughly doubled vs job boards. It does tax manager time, so we rotated hosts quarterly; want the scope doc?
But quick example: we posted the same req under two adjacent titles — ‘Support Engineer’ and ‘Implementation Specialist’ — and saw about 12% more non‑referral diversity because people search different labels. Caveat: add de‑dupe rules in the ATS or your dashboards get messy; have you tried alternate titles?