To boost diversity, companies need to rethink recruiting
To boost diversity, companies need to rethink recruiting
Following the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action, there are going to be fewer racial minorities enrolled in the country’s most selective colleges. That’s what happened in states that have already banned the practice.
That lack of diversity in certain schools will make it harder for businesses to recruit a racially diverse workforce, as economist Peter Blair Henry pointed out on “Marketplace’ on Thursday. So, maybe one solution is for companies to diversify where they do their recruiting.
Traditionally, many companies haven’t put much thought into which colleges they visit.
“So, they only go to a few places. A very common place that they go is the alma mater of their CEO,” said Peter Cappelli, a professor of management at the Wharton School — which has produced its own fair share of CEOs.
Companies looking to increase racial diversity should simply search for talent at colleges with student bodies that are underrepresented in hiring, Cappelli said. And those schools are ready for employers to stop by.
“I would like to see them in my classroom, engaging directly with my students,” said Sadie Gregory, dean of the College of Business at Coppin State University, a historically Black school in Baltimore.
Gregory said she has heard from more companies in the past couple of years, “not just reaching out to us to say, ‘I want to hire your students.’ But they’re reaching out to us and saying, ‘We’d like to do a workshop on interviewing skills.’”
Because part of recruiting is developing a culture of trust and getting students to want to come work for you. Another thing employers could do is get rid of random rules that automatically exclude people.
“They have these weird cut-offs, like, you know, ‘We won’t interview anybody who has below a 3.2 grade point average,” said Wharton’s Cappelli. “And they just assume that that predicts who’s going to be a good performer.”
It doesn’t, Cappelli added — and it now presents an opportunity for employers to get rid of any false assumptions about what school their next CEO should be a graduate of.
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