DiversityInc - November/December 2008

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you can emulate their efforts. The best answers given for each question are highlighted in yellow.

For video excerpts from these roundtables, please go to www.DiversityInc.com/ CDOroundtables.

For more specific diversity-management best practices, please go to www. DiversityIncBestPractices.com, and go to www.DiversityInc Webinars. com to see our webinars related to all of these topics.

1

Recruitment

All of our chief diversity
officers agree: In a slow-
ing economy, maintaining
and increasing the commitment
to hiring people from tradition-
ally underrepresented groups
is even more critical. Since it’s
a buyer’s market, this gives
your company a real chance to
find some amazing talent both
at the entry level and the more
senior levels.

What’s crucial is making the effort and having a continuing national reputation as a diversity leader. For more on recruitment, go to www. DiversityIncBestPractices. com/recruitment, and see our webinar on recruitment by going to www.DiversityInc Webinars. com/recruitment

HERE’S WHAT THEY SAID: Allen Thomas: We had a bit of a downturn in our economy in the mid-1990s and after Sept. 11. We made a mistake then in an effort to retract and make sure we had control over expenses—we curtailed recruiting. When we woke up five years later, and things were looking up, all of a sudden we found out that we didn’t have the positions we needed to fulfill the needs of our clients. So today, we’re a lot more prudent about it, and we think that in a downturn, there’s probably no better time to attack the diverse recruiting marketplace. We say that in these next two years, it’s the easiest time in the world for us to double diverse recruiting.

Subha V. Barry: When you have an overall pullback in hiring, the ability to go to the low-hanging fruit—in this case the majority populations—for that diminished number that you’re bringing into the company, that’s the easy thing to do. This is where our dedicated diversity and inclusion recruiting teams made a difference. We had SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) teams in the women’s, Hispanic and gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender markets where the employee professional networks partnered with our recruiting staff to go out to

the universities to help recruit the best diverse students. What that ensured was that even though we may have been bringing in fewer

Recruitment

40%

30%

20%

Up 39%

10%

Up 17%

0

DiversityInc Top 50

Share of U.S. Non-White Employees

DiversityInc Top 50

Share of U. S. Non-White Managers

From 2003-2008

people, we still had our eye on the ball as it relates to attracting the best talent—and they are diverse.

Rohini Anand: We’re only as good as our people, and we’re projecting to recruit 2 million people over the next 10 years. Our efforts have been focused on partnering with organizations at the grassroots level with our network groups to recruit the best talent. One of the other key ways that we are able to recruit the best talent is through branding ourselves as diversity leaders.