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I’m “sick and tired” of having to explain just how much disabled people deserve to work, can work, and want to work, a high-level U.S. Labor Department official says.

Neil Romano, assistant secretary, office of disability policy, told the ILG conference today that people still believe the myth that disabled people are receiving plenty of money and don’t need to work. On the contrary, Romano argues: the disabled are innovators who crave the chance at developing products others may not have thought of.

“The marginalization of people with disabilities starts very, very early,” Romano said, speaking from personal experience as a dyslexic. He said every job he has ever received has been from word of mouth, because his disability prevented him from successfully and correctly applying for jobs. “I completely messed up the health care forms at the Department of Labor — so much so that I wasn’t covered for two months,” he jokes. (Romano also tells the endearing story of when he called his mother to tell her the White House nominated him to his job, only to hear his mother respond, “do they know you can’t spell?”)

Disabilities are a running theme of this year’s ILG, with many speakers arguing that disabled job candidates are the next wave of diversity, the next band of talent largely shut out of the workplace, as women and blacks once were.

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For as long as HR has been a separate function from the business, there has always existed a certain tension when it comes to who is primarily responsible for influencing employee retention.

Business management often argues that recruiters are not presenting the right candidates, and in perfect “hiring hindsight” find fault on the basis of candidate education level, character attributes, work experience, technical skills, compensation, etc.

Recruiters are quick to remind management that they present, but do not select, candidates for hire, and that most employees who leave a position do so because of other issues such as training, keep reading…

Raghav had a packed room in San Diego for a presentation on diversity — the overriding theme of which was how to make a business case for diversity. The need for a solid business case for a diversity program appears to be overlooked more often than not. Much of the literature on diversity suggests that the benefits are obvious, though this is contradicted by available evidence from multiple studies. Telling the faithful that they’ve been worshipping a false god never goes over well. As expected, many in the diversity community have attacked the motivations of the researchers or said that the evidence is illogical.

While the reactions are understandable, what’s not is why the advocates of diversity don’t do much to help their cause. Instead of making an effort to demonstrate where diversity can add value, the approach has been to keep insisting that diversity is beneficial for employers in general, without any proof to support the claim. It should be taken on faith that investing in diversity is a good idea and that questioning the value indicates opposition stemming from bigotry or ignorance.

A Solution in Search of a Problem

Diversity is EEO plus. Equal employment opportunity alone would ensure that there was diversity in the workforce for most employers. An employer would have to work very hard to reach a state of no diversity among its employees. With women making up 51% of the population, African Americans 13%, Hispanics 15%, and Asians 4%, the employer would need to be actively engaged in discrimination to avoid any diversity. Any employer that does so would not be around for long.

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While historically devoid of much diversity, the tax profession is starting to change.

Tony Santiago, who recently launched the niche site TaxDiversity.com, says he started this site to change the perception of an industry dominated by white males.

“As a recruiting firm and industry resource, we saw a lack of diversity particularly among minorities in the tax profession, as well as a lack of women in senior leadership roles,” says Santiago.

“While individual companies have developed certain initiatives, no one has stepped up to create a comprehensive plan encompassing the entire tax profession,” he says.

The site has job openings, forums, case studies, and video commentary from successful minority tax professionals.

Santiago says he has hopes of setting up scholarships and providing mentors to those who are interested in the profession.

Microsoft must have heard Santiago’s pleas, because just last week the company pledged $1 million to the National Association of Black Accountants.

Microsoft says this gift — a mix of cash and software over the next three years — can help to build a pipeline of African-American talent in the accounting and finance professions.

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You probably know of Working Mother magazine for its annual list of “100 best companies” that actively recruit and retain those multitasking wonder women known as working moms.

But the magazine for career-committed mothers, which reaches two million readers, also has an annual award to honor companies committed to diversity.

The magazine’s new list honors 20 companies that require manager training on diversity issues and rate manager performance partly on diversity results, such as how many multicultural women advance.

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One of the specific challenges recruiters face is how to translate a candidate’s qualifications from their military job, Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) or Military Occupational Classification (MOC), to the civilian title.

It takes some education and understanding of the military lingo, occupational specialties, and career progression within the military structure to fully understand whether this person can fill your specific need.

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Financial services firm Edward Jones has partnered with 100 Black Men of America, Inc. in a collaborative effort designed to raise awareness of the firm’s career opportunities within the African-American community, and to provide financial education programming in communities where both organizations have a presence. The goal is to offer more choices to investors who are diversifying faster than the pool of financial advisors.

“We’re trying to offer more choices to investors,” says Price Woodward, principal of Financial Advisor Recruiting and Hiring at Edward Jones. “A growing number of our investors are Asian, black or Hispanic and many are females. The investment advisor profession has been very white and very male dominated. Not only do we want to diversify because we think it’s the right thing to do, by the same token, we need to offer greater choices to our investors.”

In addition to the partnership pilot with 100 Black Men, the firm is using outside recruiters to meet its hefty diversity applicant requirements and has recently moved a tenured female financial advisor into a dedicated recruiting position in an effort to boost the strategic recruitment of female financial advisors.

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Being a diversity recruiter must feel like being in an M.C. Escher drawing. Just when you think you’re getting ahead, you realize you’re heading back to where you started.

Success is elusive because diversity recruiting goals are poorly defined and one-dimensional. Your goal is to increase the proportion of women and other minorities in the candidate pool. But whatever success you achieve is blunted by a failure to support integration with special efforts. Most employers that commit to diversity recruiting do little to ensure that managers devote the time and energy necessary to ensure that diversity hires fit in with the organization and receive the support they need to succeed. It’s not that diversity hires are singled out for this treatment. The same is true of most hires in most organizations, but that’s another article. In this article, we’ll focus on how diversity recruitment can be a success.

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As practiced today, diversity is chiefly about improving the ratios of gender and race among applicants and hires. In a recent article, I discussed that while this may appear to be a worthwhile goal, the evidence from multiple studies demonstrates that this limited view of diversity is actually counterproductive. Instead of delivering any significant business benefits, employers experience mostly negative effects, such as higher turnover.

Achieving a net positive from diversity requires a strong emphasis on assimilation. An organization must actively work at ensuring that all candidates come to accept and share its values, mission, and purpose. If diversity recruiting is to be effective, it needs to be done differently.

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Connecticut’s Governor Jodi Rell says the state is offering up to $2 million in funding to employers and others who “plan and implement creative ways to help people with disabilities join the workforce.”

The state will offer up to 10 contracts of up to $200,000 each.

An 85-page PDF file about the program is available.

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On October 16, Silicon Valley’s San Jose Mercury News reported that Silicon Valley ranks last in promoting women to senior-level positions. In fact, only 9% of companies in Santa Clara County, which is home to Silicon Valley, have promoted a woman to a top position. And hip Apple has no women at all in its executive ranks.

This sad story is repeated all over the country, despite the fact that women are an emerging powerhouse of talent.

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Marvin Smith, project manager for Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices division, co-wrote this article.

Diversity is a subject of great importance to recruiters. Most organizations have some stated diversity goals. Larger employers have director-level positions and even entire departments devoted to the goal of increasing diversity. Corporations are estimated to spend over $8 billion annually on diversity programs. This all has a purpose, presumably that more diversity is better.

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Peter Cappelli’s not losing sleep over the aging workforce, but Cingular Wireless is a little short on shut-eye.

Cindy Mayer, the company’s executive director of staffing, easily rattles off a laundry list of statistics about how quickly the workforce is aging and how a crisis is impending because of too many jobs for too few people.

You’ve seen them in a suburban mall near you– the company hired about 6,500 to 7,000 retail sales consultants last year. It has been trying to increase the number of Spanish-speaking employees in order to better serve Hispanic customers, and is increasing the numbers of part-time employees. All the while, it’s trying to reduce time to hire and increase productivity.

Mayer, speaking at the Human Capital Institute conference yesterday in Phoenix (at the dreaded pre-cocktail-hour timeslot), is aiming for 30% store attrition. Her company gets about 15 applicants per hire, or about 100,000 candidates annually for those 6,500 or so hires.

These candidates are high-school grads, college students, and college grads. They’re not in it for the long haul; average tenure is about 2.8 years, she says. What’s more, “there are markets where there are just not that many 20-somethings.”

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You may be wondering why I am qualified to write an article on diversity sourcing.

My buddy and diversity recruiting guru Martin de Campo and I discussed this at length, in a dark dining room in downtown San Jose surrounded by rich hardwood paneling and more multicultural influences than you can shake a stick at. It became apparent that not only did we both share a passion for this topic, but we approached it from two very different yet complementary and equally successful angles.

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Companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to recruit talent at diversity recruiting conferences, but the results can be minimal. We need to address this problem if we are to be seen as business-problem solvers, and not just recruiters.

As many of you know, there are quite a multitude of diverse organizations that put on annual conferences, such as the National Black MBA Association, National Society of Hispanic MBAs, and the National Society of Black Engineers.

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A recent McKinsey survey revealed that almost half of all Baby Boomers expect to work past the age of 65, and a recent Merrill Lynch study found that 76 percent of boomers don?t anticipate a ?traditional? retirement.

But the McKinsey research found that only 13% of retirees have actually worked as long as they had intended and that the average actual age of retirement is just 59.

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The nation’s largest drugstore chain has launched a new recruiting website to hire people with disabilities for its future distribution center in Anderson, South Carolina, beginning next summer.?

Walgreens has launched the site to describe jobs that will be available at the future Walgreens distribution center and is designed to be accessible by people with sensory, physical, and cognitive disabilities.

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Two out of five companies do not disclose employee diversity information, according to a survey of 3,100 senior human resources executives by Novations Group, a consulting and training organization based in Boston.

Thirty-eight percent of companies regard their diversity metrics as proprietary and keep them confidential, while 35% provide such data just to concerned groups, such as employees, vendors, or customers. Only 26% of employers make their diversity recruiting and workforce inclusion data public.

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Here are two basic principles of recruiting that you need to apply when targeting passive candidates, diversity candidates, or any type of candidates in high demand:

• The more competition there is for a group of candidates (like nurses, pharmacists, sales reps who always exceed quota, design engineers who were elected to Tau Beta Pi, diversity candidates, etc.), the more recruiting effort is required to attract and hire them.

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In Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent new book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, he demonstrates that the power of our unconscious biases is often greater than that of our conscious beliefs. What we believe is frequently overshadowed by assumptions we’re often unaware we’re making. Like it or not, this spills over into almost all of our hiring decisions, and it can affect how we interview and perceive diverse candidates. Why Do We Hate Short People? What if I told you that companies regularly discriminate against short people when they are hiring top executives? That’s ridiculous, right? Yes, some companies may discriminate by race, sex, or ethnicity, but surely our “vertically challenged” friends don’t need protected-class status! Yet some level of bias clearly exists. An excerpt from Blink on the “tall CEO” phenomenon:

I polled about half of the companies on the Fortune 500 list ó the largest corporations in the United States ó asking each company questions about its CEOs. The heads of big companies are, as I’m sure comes as no surprise to anyone, overwhelmingly white men, which undoubtedly reflects some kind of implicit bias. But they are also virtually all tall: In my sample, I found that on average CEOs were just a shade under six feet. Given that the average American male is 5′9″, that means that CEOs, as a group, have about three inches on the rest of their sex. But this statistic actually understates matters. In the U.S. population, about 14.5 percent of all men are six feet or over. Among CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, that number is 58 percent. Even more strikingly, in the general American population, 3.9 percent of adult men are 6′2″ or taller. Among my CEO sample, 30 percent were 6′2″ or taller.

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