Recently Diversity Sourcing has been on my mind, especially with Diversity Inc releasing it’s 2009 Top 50 Employer List last week. There are so many ways to seek out diverse candidates, there isn’t just one stock answer to finding them and the companies on this particular list truly have embraced the complete diversity employment picture.

I truly hope your diversity sourcing strategy goes beyond just posting openings to a site like the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE). I know there are companies that feel that way, the whole "I put a post up, so I did my part" kind of thinking. But now there are so many ways to leverage the potential in these groups. I bring up NSBE in particular because last week I had the opportunity to attend a tweet-up in D.C. and met a couple of gentleman from Texas who literally rolled their eyes at me when I told them they could source diverse engineers in Social Networks and via SecondLife. And as we talked about it, they certainly started to come around, and see there were many more excellent ways to get in contact with diverse candidates.

NSBE, my association of choice today, has a huge focus on reaching out to its membership. They’ve worked in partnership with IBM (the original SecondLife guru’s) for more than a year now. If you search groups on MySpace or Facebook or LinkedIn for “NSBE”, you’ll find groups full of members, sometimes even broke down by chapters. I searched LinkedIn directly for NSBE groups, and came up with 14. I also dug into Ning, not through its search interface, but with a very basic XRay like this:

site:ning.com “NSBE”

And came up with some interesting results, that certainly lead me to names of potential candidates depending on how I finessed my search string and of course to NSBE chapters on Ning.

If you XRay NSBE’s site you’ll certainly find some leads, and you know I’m going to suggest that you dig a bit deeper and go to Yahoo to FlipSearch the organization as well. And while NSBE has certainly been right at the forefront of the social media movement, don’t forget any other techie/engineering type group that is also investing itself online and catering to a diverse population like SWE, AISES, SHPE and more. All of them have the same potential, and lead to more and more opportunities to create an environment that may someday land your company on DiversityInc.’s Top 50 employer list.