Build a Talent Pipeline for ‘Diverse’ Leaders


By REBECCA HASTINGS from SHRM Diversity
December, 2007

Organizations wishing to reap the business benefits of a diverse workforce sometimes say they have a hard time finding "diverse talent" in the marketplace. Experts say employers should build their own pipeline for talent so a pool of applicants will be available when there’s a job opening to fill.

To build a pipeline, organizations first have to know what they want and why, says Pipier Bewlay, senior vice president of human resources, training and development for INROADS, a nonprofit organization that provides training and internships for minority youth. "Organizations have to go back and truly evaluate what they are looking for, where they want to be and what [they are] willing to do to make that happen," she says.

Bewlay says organizations can develop their own pipeline by spending time educating students at local high schools about the organization, what it offers and how it supports the community.

But she says organizations must also develop an employee brand that helps prospective employees clearly see how they fit into the organization. For example, organizations often use photographs of people of color in recruitment brochures and on company web sites. Bewlay says such images are important to candidates but that a company should be sure not to use only models in communication tools: "You have to showcase diversity, but it has to be diversity you actually have in your company."

Similarly, Bewlay says prospective employees also will want to know if an organization’s board members are visibly diverse. If not, she says some may think twice about whether that’s the organization they want to work for. "It’s not just the recruitment piece on the front end; it’s everything the organization does," she says, including efforts to train employees and managers about diversity management issues.

Link the Pipeline to the Business

Companies often have "make" or "buy" decisions, in which they have to decide whether to build what they need internally or obtain it from an external source, says Valerie Frederickson, CEO and founder of Valerie Frederickson & Co., an HR consulting firm in Menlo Park, Calif. She says the same thing can be said about diverse talent. Organizations need to decide whether, over the long term, it’s better to make the talent they need or buy it from someone else.

"Everyone in HR can understand how diversity makes good business sense and can come up with pragmatic, cost effective, actionable items to help their companies increase their diversity pool," Frederickson says, by doing research, putting together partnerships, finding where diversity candidates are now or helping the company grow them. And those who work on building relationships with candidates eventually will have enough applicants to draw from, she says.

But that doesn’t mean an organization should seek just anyone of color to fill its positions. "Who you look for should be based on the knowledge, skills, abilities and core competencies that are needed to support the top three strategic objectives of the organization," says Grace Odums a Philadelphia-based independent consultant. To ensure candidates fit the organization’s needs, she suggests:

• Creating a strategic recruiting plan. "Often you can’t find people because you are haphazardly looking for them," Odums says. "If you keep looking in the same spot, you’re going to find the same thing."
• Linking incentive compensation of directors and managers to diversity hiring and retention. Odums says hiring managers who are not held accountable for identifying diverse talent have little motivation to try harder. "But if they learn they’ll lose their bonus, they will all of a sudden find people," she says.
• Coaching managers and directors on how to identify top talent of color. "This is not about quotas; this is not about filling positions with bodies," Odums says. "This is about targeted selection of top diverse talent." But because hiring managers may lack the expertise needed, organizations should provide proper training to get them started.
• Holding managers accountable for building an organizational culture that is going to encourage employees to stay. "You can identify [diverse talent], source them and get them in the organization, but if the organization’s culture is toxic you are going to lose them," Odums says. "Managers must build an environment in which all people want to motivate themselves."
• Linking with professionals that understand the market and how to source, recruit and retain in an expert fashion. "Oftentimes … people happen into HR and once they are in HR, they happen into the role of diversity recruiter," Odums says. A diversity recruiter needs to understand the organization’s strategic objectives, where the organization is headed and what competencies are needed to make that happen.

The CEO plays a pivotal role in pipeline construction, according to Frederickson. "The most hard-to-convince people we talk to are the biotech CEOs who say there simply aren’t any women or people of color in certain positions such as medical sales or research and development," she says. "But if the CEO accepts [that] there are no excuses and tells people to start doing it, they’ll find ways to do it."

Some CEOs may need a reality check. Companies who say they can’t find enough diverse candidates now need to remember that it’s going to be a lot worse three to five years from now, Frederickson adds. "Diversity hiring is no longer about doing the right thing … it’s no longer about it making good business sense," she says. "There is just no other way you are going to get your requisitions filled. It’s Guerilla Marketing 101."

Build University Relationships

Frederickson suggests organizations start building relationships with local universities and find ways to get students involved with the company when they are freshmen or sophomores. "You have to build a long-term prospective employer relationship with the students," she says. To get started, she says companies can:

• Assign executives to speak to university classes.
• Have employees serve as mentors or advisors on group projects.
• Sponsor small scholarships such as $50 so that a student can go to an association meeting or $500 so that they can go to a conference.
• Offer internships or part-time paid positions.

"You can pretty much do whatever you want because universities need two things: money and jobs for their graduates," Frederickson says. "Even more than that, they need help in the interim period with small opportunities."

But some organizations believe they don’t have time to run an internship program, according to Matthew Zinman, president of Z University.org, a workforce readiness company. "What employers and managers need to realize is that they don’t have the time not to have interns," he says. "When well-managed, the amount of time they contribute yields productivity and many other unique benefits."

Z University.org says that employers reap a variety of benefits from internship programs:

• Interns help complete tasks that normally consume the time of full-time staff, thus freeing up employees to focus on more valuable work.
• Less-seasoned employees can gain some basic supervising experience by overseeing the duties of interns.
• An internship program enables businesses to pre-recruit, pre-qualify and pre-train potential employees and may provide significant savings in recruitment costs.
• Internships can improve a company’s reputation with schools and communities.

Whatever strategies an employer chooses should fit its needs and its budget. "There are lots of ways you can go after the people you need, and you don’t need to have the diversity budget of a Fortune 500," Frederickson says, such as by seeking candidates at churches, bowling alleys and movie theaters.

Bewlay says employers should also widen their net by recruiting from a wide range of schools. She also recommends companies reevaluate hiring criteria to make sure requirements are appropriate and realistic. "I’m not suggesting they lower their standards, but what they need today may be different from what they needed a few years ago," she says.

Frederickson says employers need to move away from the mind-set that only fully qualified candidates need apply: "Employers forget that everybody starts somewhere. They forget that everybody had a first job."

Write to Rebecca Hastings at rhastings@shrm.org