While the need for hiring Diversity is a burning political issue today in corporations, the question remains, how best do you find the highest-performing diverse hires among all hires and how do you drive diversity with hiring managers?
And, since everything in business is about the numbers, without seeing the direct dollar impact on bottom-line results of increasing diversity, most managers, without a demonstrated ROI, simply will not be motivated. The result, you are left with the two limited motivators, how to find high-performing diverse candidates and how to encourage the client to be more compelled about the need for diverse candidates.
Despite the lack of precise numbers, it is still clear how increasing diversity in many roles, especially at the executive level directly increases business results. At large companies, like Apple, the impact is in the tens of millions of dollars.
What does diversity even mean? As a recruiter, we must take a surgeon’s approach, meaning we cannot just cut, we must be concise, and deal with one segment at a time. The fact that diversity includes such a wide range of segments like African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, Women, gays, disabled people, etc., guarantees that the “one-size-fits-all” recruiting approach will fail.
Taking all this into consideration, our strategic approach is to adopt a market research approach for each subgroup and use that data. We will then treat each subgroup as a micro-segment and recruit them using the marketing data we have accumulated.
In summary: Gone are the days of spraying content and praying for results or old school campaigns. Email as a channel is still the most important connector of all of us. Our plan is to use a focused approach with both our clients and our candidates and work with marketing data to target best fit candidates.