Who’s zooming who? Basically, who is doing the front-line recruiting to diversify the employee base and the management ranks?
Diversity MBA’s benchmarking survey results focused on the recruiting structure of organizations to understand what potential gaps exist on the front lines. If diversity is a critical factor in the employee base; but companies are having a hard time identifying diverse talent, could there be bias in the recruiting ranks? This question remains unanswered. Companies and organizations need to dive deeper to discover any real issues.
DMBA is trying to understand the practices to gain understanding of what the best practices will be. Let me share some of our survey insights of the functional practices:
- 85 percent of companies spend less than 10 percent of total budget on overall recruiting; companies reported similar numbers for diverse recruiting, leading to the assumption that tracking of diversity recruiting spend is not segmented.
- More than 50 percent of recruiters’ time is focused on diversity recruiting, implying that it is embedded in the overall recruiting responsibilities.
- More than 50 percent of recruiters are white, with African Americans making up 21 percent and Hispanics 8 percent.
- 80 percent of companies have recruiters ranging from 50 to 25 years of age, showing good generational diversification.
- It appears that companies have a balanced mix of generational recruiters, which allows for broad and diverse perspectives in hiring.
- 100 percent of companies participate in professional conference recruiting for experienced employees, but hires from these conferences on average are less than 5 percent.
- 100 percent of companies have college campus recruiting strategies, but hires to fill their pipeline from this strategy are less than 20 percent.
With this basic understanding of current practices, it is clear that people do recruit who they are comfortable with and with whom they have the most in common, even if it is only ethnicity. We should ask ourselves if a subconscious bias exists that prevents recruiters and hiring managers from diversifying the ranks at the pace and rate the population is demanding. How do you identify this as a gap? Just a thought….
