Diversity Recruiting is a Long Term Strategy

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

I’m thankful that diversity is a hot topic especially in Silicon Valley and within the technology industries. Companies are establishing mentorship programs, offering scholarships and focusing recruitment efforts on female and minority candidates especially in STEM. Marylene Delbourg-Delphis, TalentCircles CEO has completed extensive research on diversity recruiting on the subject of veteran and military hiring.

But tackling the topic of diversity at your company can and will not be accomplished with the implementation of a single training program or the implementation of a sourcing platform designed for you to reach female and minatory programs. As I mentioned previously sourcing is only half of the solution and that includes your diversity recruiting and retention efforts at your company.

I want to focus here on long-term candidate pipeline building and candidate targeting through a combination of efforts including digital storytelling and employment branding focused on building a large community of active and engaged members of the diversity community in a variety of areas that provide an ongoing candidate pipeline. The key here is not just focused on the numbers of your talent network or talent community, but the quality interactions and ongoing value you bring to these individuals to help lift up not only your organization but to set the standard in your own recruiting efforts for your competitors and industry.

Companies tend to focus on the short term goals of filling positions that need to be filled, but what about recruiting not only passive candidates, but filling your pipeline with a diverse candidate pool? A company can create a strategy that focuses their efforts on diversity recruiting, but it in to be successful it’s important to create more of a long-term strategy. The long-term candidate pipeline is one that takes nurturing, branding, and digital storytelling.

Nurturing: Creating a long-term strategy consists of nurturing and taking care of the candidates in the pipeline. This means providing content and resources to help build your candidates while your company is not actively pursuing them.

Digital Storytelling: Digital storytelling means that your company needs to tell a story through multiple channels. This might include webinars, blog posts, ads, or word of mouth from happy customers. Each piece of media must play into another and work as an overall campaign in order for your story to be told across the Internet.

Employer Branding: This type of branding is something that practitioners strive to perfect in order to make hiring and recruiting much easier. When a company is able to brand their company as a “must-work” for company, candidates will start flocking without the practitioner having to spend a lot of money filing requisitions.

Being able to nurture, story tell, and brand your company in a way that screams diversity hiring will allow companies to create compelling storylines when it comes to the type of employees that work for their company. Each of these three parts places a crucial role in how a company will be able to hire for their next position. 

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media. She’s is the Chief Blogger & Founder of Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @jmillermerrell.