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The Naked Truth About Recruiting at Diversity Conferences
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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.
These associations have been around for years and have been very effective in supporting their memberships’ needs to identify great employment opportunities. Further, many have regional and local chapters that have annual scholarships and awards banquets, guest lecture series, professional development seminars, networking activities, corporate receptions, and numerous student development and scholarship programs. (Can you begin to see how great recruiters can do so well here? I thought so.)
For those of you who have never attended these conferences, think of them as job fairs on steroids; thousands of candidates looking for their next opportunities and hundreds of companies trying to do everything to recruit these candidates.
These conferences offer a great venue for companies to showcase their name, organization, and brand; to sponsor everything from case competitions and cyber cafes to having your name on the bag that is given to the candidates for all the freebies.
Most important, these conferences allow your organization a real opportunity to hire diverse talent from these memberships if you know how to do it effectively and you are willing to put in the time to plan an effective strategy that has a mature and effective back-end recruiting process to guarantee that no candidates fall through the cracks.
If this sounds like a better way to get things done, let’s see how to get there in two simple steps!
Year after year, I see recruiting organizations attend these conferences with little to no success at acquiring diverse talent, so let’s define success right here. Success is making hires. If there is no success, why is that?
For example, did you come to the event unprepared or did candidates simply fall through the cracks in the process?
To get to an answer, let’s start with six simple questions:
Is your organization now paying large agency fees to hire the very candidates that slipped between their fingers due to an immature hiring process? If so, this would be the ultimate waste of valuable resources and would never happen if a mature recruiting process were in place.
That’s why the recruiter who wants results needs to make the process changes that will yield a better ROI.
Now that you can see the value of a mature recruiting process, let’s look at Carnegie Mellon’s Capability Maturity Model so we can start to put a definition to it. (Where is your organization in this list?)
Simply stated, here are the five categories, according to Carnegie Mellon:
* Undefined processes
* Unpredictable results (Not good)
* Basic process definition
* Limited consistency
* Unable to measure results (A step up)
* Defined processes
* Most groups consistent
* Ability to measure results (Getting better)
* Well-defined processes
* Organizational consistency
* Managed results (Looking very good)
* Process optimization
* Quality enhancement (Very few can claim this level)
Unfortunately, the recruiting model that I consistently see at conferences is to send a bunch of people to stand in a booth or behind a table and hope the right candidates walk by. Once the conference is over, everyone drinks beer, eats those greasy little cheese balls, and takes the stacks of resumes that no one knows what to do with back to corporate so they can get put in a drawer until next year.
By the above definition, this ad-hoc process is not very good. Now, let’s look at how to optimize.
If you want to get more ROI on diversity initiatives, I urge you to consider the following as a direct line to more effective diversity hiring:
As you can imagine, there are many more things we can examine pertaining to recruiting process maturity. This is just one example of why moving away from the ad-hoc stage toward the higher levels of intelligent process will support better and more effective hiring at all levels of the organization.