The push for diversity talent is a major initiative within corporations.  This is no easy task by any means.  You are dealing with a smaller candidate pool than normal.  The level of difficult is magnified and sometimes you are looking for diversity candidates who are minority within their own group!  

Diversity programs should exist on 3 fronts: Recruiting, Sourcing, and Marketing.  Depending on the size of your company, these can easily be spread out between multiple people and teams.  Other times if you are a smaller company, then you may leave all of this on the shoulders of one individual 

Sourcing

Sourcing for diversity talent is not an impossible task.  There are many ways to customize the searches that you are already using in order to find candidates of various diverse groups.  These can include social media searches, online diversity organizations, speakers, universities, and personal websites.  

For example, if you are looking for female engineers who come from a computer science background, you can easily focus on specific associations like WITI (Women in Technology International).  Take the name of the association and use it in a Linkedin search like this:

(bscs OR mscs OR "computer science") (witi OR "women in technology international")

Here are the results.  Easy to do. And this is just one association.  There are hundreds of diversity associations that you can use. 

Recruiting and Branding

Successful diversity programs work at a company because:

• The company's unified commitment and vision to attract diverse talent
  
  
• The partnerships with diversity programs at schools (K-12)
  
  
• The partnerships between their university relations group and onsite diversity programs at colleges
  
  
• Involvement with diversity organizations / associations and local chapters
  
  
• Strong presence with online communities (official sites, LI Groups, Meetups, etc.) and active members of these communities
  
  
• Consistently sourcing pipelines of diversity candidates - even those candidates that are not yet a fit for the company
  
  
• Job campaigns that exist for every diversity employment portal - there are more than you know
  
  
• The company's brand is honestly represented within the diversity community
  
  
• The company has an employee and candidate referral program that pays off
  
  
• They consistently do all of the above - not just from time to time

Depending on which diversity group you are looking for, you will need to do some research into the available candidate pool.  For instance, did you know in the U.S., about 18 percent to 20 percent of engineering students are now women?  And believe it or not, that is a higher number when you compare it to years past.  

To Learn More

I will be talking about Diversity Sourcing & Recruiting at HIREconf in San Francisco next week.  If you are local, you should check out the conference.  It will contain a ton of actionable sourcing methods and recruitment strategies for a very low price.  In fact, the first 5 people who register with this discount code will get in for free!  You can thank me later.  :) 

Mark Tortorici
Founder & Training Expert
Transform Talent Acquisition