The cannabis industry has grown exponentially over the past decades as more and more states and countries around the world have decriminalized the recreational use of marijuana.
Yet, despite its progressive field and product focus, the cannabis sector is still very biased and undiversified, with 90% of cannabis chief executive officers being white and men.
So, how should the weed industry recruit for diversification, and how can a cannabis company achieve having a diverse staff?
Bias And People
Bias is a fundamental aspect of the way our brains function. Our brains have many cognitive preconceptions that enable them to take shortcuts to deal with elaborate data faster.
This, nevertheless, can result in people making irrational choices. No matter how hard we try to be righteous and unbiased, we construct biased blind spots during our lives.
Bias In The Cannabis Industry
Cannabis staffing is one of those places where bias creeps in. Thankfully, though, there seem to be methods for dealing with these bias blind spots of ours.
So, the first way your cannabis company could start recruiting for diversity would be by evaluating your hiring process and fixing its weaknesses.
You can improve the validity of your organization’s policies by changing your candidate assessment approaches. Even so, you must first recognize the presence of discrimination and bias to improve your practices.
The Advantages Of Diversified Cannabis Staff
Having diversity in the workplace of your cannabis company, you will benefit from more perceptions, enabling your innovation and ingenuity as a collective to prosper.
Another thing you ought to prioritize is the exchange of knowledge.
The cannabis industry can drive innovation and creatively address issues once it develops a culture of collaborative learning and increasing diversity in the workforce.
Furthermore, your cannabis personnel will become more approachable to a broader audience. The cannabis community is made up of a diverse group of individuals.
Your audience will be more likely to become loyal when your business mirrors the melting pot that constitutes the cannabis community.
As a result, with a diversified cannabis workforce, you can widen your promotional prospects. Looking at the stats, racially and ethnically diverse collectives outmatch less multicultural ones by 35%.
Your company and its employees have a greater chance of constant progress with a more diversified cannabis group, both in terms of mode of thinking and performance. Looking to hire for diversification in the cannabis sector is thus a given.
Assessment Of Diversity Initiatives In The Hiring Process
The first step is for your company to carry out a diversity recruiting assessment. And this is not merely an assessment of the recruiting process. It is an assessment of your entire cannabis label.
Scrutinize your cannabis hiring operation carefully so you’ll be able to make the necessary changes. Are your cannabis job adverts comprehensive? Assess the questions you pose on your job application.
You should want to know about gender identity instead of sex and have ‘non-binary’ instead of ‘other’ as an option, as well as include a space for pronouns where people can write the one they prefer to be used for them.
Is your cannabis company open to people of diverse backgrounds, racial groups, and cultures? Go further than workplace diversity.
Contemplate your company image and the audience it tends to attract.
Consider the advantages you’re providing as well. Do your employee benefits, for instance, entail floating holiday time to cater to different cultures, flextime, and the possibility of working from anywhere?
The most important thing, however, is to follow through on your words. Looking to hire for a diverse culture in the cannabis sector requires persistence.
What does your company do to encourage diversification in the cannabis industry? Candidates will scrutinize your company.
Gathering information on the ways your brand is seen by them as well as how it acts on that information is therefore essential for the hiring practices evaluation.
You could even perform an anonymized survey to assess diversity within the company before hiring for diversity to see how you’ve been doing so far.
Finding Cannabis-Qualified Applicants
There are numerous things you could do if you are having difficulty attracting diverse applicants.
After conducting your diversity recruitment assessment, you will gain a better understanding of your inadequacies to then zero in on specific aspects of the recruiting phase, beginning with candidate sourcing.
Below are a few initiatives you can take to broaden your cannabis applicant pool:
Change The Job Descriptions
Gender coding subtly manifests itself in most job descriptions, with words like ‘strong’ and ‘bold’ usually attracting more men rather than women.
Unneeded terminology or company vernacular also keeps younger people from applying, while failing to keep the description to the essentials can keep men but especially women from applying when they see that they don’t meet every single one of the requirements.
So, make sure to edit your description to attract the right people for the job.
Show Your Diversity Initiatives
There’s no better way to attract diverse candidates than to prove to them that you are looking for more diversity in your company.
Do you already have a staff that is diverse? Post something about them on your socials and website and make sure to have diverse staff in the hiring process.
Be Flexible
Working from home and working flex time is important for people and a great way to attract more applicants.
Not only that but having people work from home means you can hire people from across the country or even the world.
This way, you can hire diverse people of different cultures who will prove to be valuable in offering a completely different viewpoint.
The Bottom Line
The cannabis industry is a progressive one, but it fails in being diverse.
With a diverse audience and a cannabis community formed by people of different races, cultures, and genders around the world, it is important for your company to reflect that diversity.
Having a diverse staff to work in your company is crucial if you want to stay true to your customers, and hiring for diversity is the way to start working on that.
With cannabis becoming legal in more places (about time!) I think that more people need to become acquainted with it and how to use it.
Hi, my name is David Barton and I have been using medical cannabis for almost a year.
After I developed panic attacks in my final year of college, I felt powerless. The anxiety was so bad that I could barely leave the house. I couldn’t maintain a job, I alienated myself from my friends and family, and I felt downright miserable.
No one around me used cannabis, so I had to learn all about it on my own while using it. It was more difficult than you might think!
That is why I created my website, to teach anyone else struggling all they need to know about cannabis. It’s a fun topic to learn about, and I’m sure you’ll all need this information in the future!
![What You Need To Know About Cannabis Labs [Setup + Training]](https://motagistics.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/What-You-Need-To-Know-About-Cannabis-Labs-Setup-Training.jpg "What You Need To Know About Cannabis Labs [Setup + Training]")
