Recruiting Strategies to Improve Your Diversity Brand
by Johnny Torrance-Nesbitt
Recruiting Strategieslobal war for talent, your recruitment efforts can not ignore what your are currently doing in Diversity and Diversity Recruitment Marketing. Proudly display these Diversity efforts on your firm’s career page and social media channels. For instance you might want to highlight your firm’s:
(1.) Diversity Vision and Statement (write this if you haven’t already),
(2.) Diversity Training for Senior Management and Employees.
Also a Diversity Brand review should be undertaken to assess how “Diversity friendly” your firm actually is. Once this is completed, you can begin to work on a unified “Diversity Recruiting Strategy.”
For example, here is what I created and implemented in Global Staffing at Monsanto (which led to some impressive results—see below). I led an Diversity Recruiting Effort built around:
(1) Training for all Recruiters to become (AIRS) “Certified Diversity Recruiters,”
(2) Passive diverse candidate pipeline development,
(3) Leveraging Diversity Associations,
(4) Leveraging in-house Diversity Employee Groups,
(5) Creation of Diversity collateral materials,
(6) Use of Diversity media outlets/websites (local AM/FM Radio, HireDiversity, etc.),
(7) Minority Career Fairs (HACE, NBMBA, LULAC, BDPA, etc.), and
(8) Partnerships with Manrrs, AFA, FFA, WIT, etc.
This new and unified strategy led to some key Recruitment Diversity Metrics for Professional Hires in the US:
(1.) “POC” Applicant Flow increased 79% over the previous year; and the flow increased some 70% in the following year;
(2.) POC Applicants interviewed surged above 30+% for several years, reaching 37% (of all Applicants), and
(3.) POC Hires reached 24% of US Professional Hires and in the following year, POC Hires reached 36%.
At Unext.com and Lockheed, I utilized similar strategies. At Unext.com we exceeded overall Diversity Hiring goals for POC (goal 15%, results 22%) and Women (goal 30%, results 50%). While at Lockheed, I led efforts that increased the flow of women and minorities candidates, achieving a 20% increased in POC hiring–surpassing an internal benchmark.
Obviously, social media can help to improve these results. For example, Facebook can help you recruit more Diverse candidates and also help leverage your Diversity Brand message. It can be used to create Talent Community of Diverse candidates. You can showcase your current on-going Diversity efforts and Programs on your company’s Facebook page, or (as I would highly recommend for larger brands) by creating a “Diversity Careers” brand Facebook page. This page should be as inclusive as possible and should have inclusive imagery from all “walk of life”—all groups should be represented. It could also list the various Diverse group and associations and organizations you have partnerships with for Talent Acquisition purposes, such as, (to name only a few) Hire Heroes USA (Veterans), HRC advocates on behalf of LGBT Americans, etc. and AsianMBA.org.
To get started, here is the tool kit of Diversity Recruitment Strategies:
(1.) Commercial spots on radio stations (AM & FM) with high ethnic demographics (multiple languages),
(2.) Diverse images on the Career Page website
(3.) Post Testimonials on the Career website from Minority & Women Employees, Interns, etc., from all levels.
(4.) Seek volunteers from line areas to serve as “Diversity Recruiting Champions”.
(5.) Use New Employee orientation as a recruiting mechanism,
(6.) conducting an “Open House,” while inviting specific Minority Organizations, and
(7.) deeply engaging with local civic and community-based organization on outreach efforts.
Just a brief word about building community outreach efforts. You might want to develop a “Diversity Marketing Plan” as I did, which included: Career Fair efforts at inner city High Schools and donating textbooks; industry trade magazines and newspaper articles on successful Monsanto executives who were People of Color; and partnering with the local Urban League (and a local HBCU) to deliver a career workshop on “How to be Successful in a Behavioral Interview.”
You might consider, creating a Web page with the unique title of “Minorities in Your Industry,” with a unique url. When this phrase is typed in to Google for a search (by a Minority job seeker), up pops a page with this title and information about Career Opportunities at your firm. It would then have an embedded link back to your main Career page. Furthermore, conduct feedback sessions/focus group with Minority and Women Employees in order to learn more about: “How to attract more Minority and Women Employees.” in knowing your current status going forward, it’s imperative to schedule focus groups to be held periodically.
You also can build an Alumni page on your website or Facebook to stay connected with all high performers (in general) who left as well high performing Minority/Women alumni. And, you could focus on making an employer branding award list, such asBlack Enterprise’s list of “40 Best Companies for Diversity” or Diversity Inc’s “Top Ten Companies for Asians Americans to Work For”, etc.
Lastly, when a firm begins a Diversity effort, it will need some metrics. These metrics should be used to evaluate how well the organization is doing on their diversity and inclusion program. These proposed metrics after based on my experience in the US. Keep in mind, rolling out a Global metrics program is challenging– given regional variations in the demographics of the populace in other countries. For example, these Diversity Recruiting Metrics typically around race and ethnicity tend to be much used in the US. Examples:
(1.) increase in minority representation overall,
(2.) percentage of minorities,
(3.) EEO targets,
(4.) increased representation of minorities at different levels of firm,
(5.) better retention of underrepresented staff, and
(6.) decrease in pay disparities.
By instituting some of these relatively low cost recruiting programs as I have, your firm can become a “Diversity Recruiting Champion,” leading the way in the global war for Diverse talent and innovation.
Source: http://www.smartrecruiters.com/blog/recruiting-strategies-to-improve-your-diversity-brand/
