Smart Job Search Tips for Minority Candidates

Job Tips for Minorities

When David Matthews, 37, decided not to follow his employer to another part of the country, he became a highly marketable job candidate. He's an Ivy League-educated African-American with solid experience in a Fortune 500 company. By late last year he was weighing three job offers. Unlike mainstream executives who compare offers on the basis of salary and work environment, Mr. Matthews had another factor to consider: which of the three companies had the most serious commitment to diversity.

"I wanted to join an organization where I could add value," Mr. Matthews says, "where my ideas would be implemented. I didn't want to be in a situation where I had to work hard just to convince people that my ideas had merit." In other words, Mr. Matthews wanted to be hired for his talents, not as window dressing to fill an employer's need to place a minority face into a senior-level post. He'd been the senior manager for affirmative action and diversity programs at Nabisco Inc. prior to its purchase by Kraft Foods when he declined a relocation to Chicago. After weeks of careful research and many sessions in which he asked interviewers hard questions, Mr. Matthews accepted a position as director of affirmative action and employee relations with the KPMG International office in Montvale, N.J.

The job market has tightened since then, but minority managers and executives like Mr. Matthews are still in demand. Jeffrey Christian, chief executive officer of Christian & Timbers in Cleveland, says, "Our clients feel diversity is more important now than ever." The economic slowdown, he says, actually helps, by giving search firms more time to put together diverse candidate pools. Jane Greenwald, a partner in Edison, N.J., with recruiter Battalia Winston International, says companies whose recruiting budgets have been slashed are still turning to outside recruiters to help them fill their diversity needs.

Before accepting a job offer, any diverse candidate should mirror Mr. Matthews's research. Start by finding out whether your potential employer is really committed to diversity and to nurturing diverse hires. Such research can begin at home, with your magazine rack, television set and computer. Consider the following tips culled from interviews with recruiters from the top executive-search firms that specialize in diversity recruiting.

Advertising

Check out the ads on your favorite TV shows. Companies that are welcoming to minorities tend to signal that commitment with media ads that include both mainstream and minority faces. According to WetFeet Inc., a San Francisco-based recruitment-services firm, 20% of job seekers apply to companies as a result of seeing product ads.

Does the employer you're considering advertise in publications targeted to minority populations, such as the career-guidance magazines Woman Engineer, Careers & the Disabled, and Hispanic Career World, published by Equal Opportunity Publications in Melville, N.Y.? Is the company featured in ads and editorial matter in magazines like Black Entrepreneur and the Minority Law Journal?

The Web

Your next level of research is the Internet. Each year Fortune magazine and the nonprofit Center for Responsibility in Business, for example, survey the nation's top companies and publish a list dubbed The Best Companies for Minorities. The Hispanic Association on Corporate Responsibility in Washington, D.C., recently published its annual Corporate Governance Study, a report on Hispanic inclusion in America's top 1,000 companies. The corporations that rank highest for the number of Hispanic executives and board members are likely to be welcoming to other minorities as well.

You can check out the minority landscape of any company or organization by going to its Web site. Are there minority faces on the site and in the company's annual report? Are minority initiatives featured in its press releases? Almost every major employer has added a careers or job-recruitment section to its Web site. Does your potential employer's career site have a section devoted to diversity? A corporation that includes a few lip-service sentences about equal-opportunity hiring is certainly less welcoming than a company like NIKE Inc., in Seattle, whose diversity recruiting site features its mission statement and animated profiles of minority workers.

Job Boards

Organizations committed to diversity hiring post jobs on targeted Internet job boards. According to AIRS, a provider of e-recruitment training services in Wilder, Vt., 106 of the 3,412 job boards listed on its www.airsdirectory.com site target diverse populations. Check out the sites devoted to your minority group to see if your target company is recruiting there.

Personal Contacts

The best way to feel out whether a company is welcoming to minorities in general is, of course, to go there. Garnet Hyder, a 50-year-old African-American professional, recently accepted a job as the associate director of Human Resources for the California Endowment, a not-for-profit health-care foundation in Woodland Hills, Calif. "I'd done some research on the Endowment and talked to people with contacts here," she says, "but I didn't know how committed to the cause they were until I walked in the door. There were minority faces everywhere."

That isn't always the case. "It speaks volumes if you talk to 10 people during an interview," Ms. Hyder says, "and none is a person of color." According to another survey conducted by WetFeet, more than one-third of job candidates say they'll eliminate a company from their consideration if it lacks ethnic or gender diversity.

Policies and Programs

You can tell even more about an organization, Ms. Hyder says, by asking how it infuses diversity into its daily work. The Endowment, for example, keeps a diversity calendar and recognizes minority religious and cultural events throughout the year. Ask if the company offers mentoring programs for minority hires and affinity groups or facilitated discussions where like employees can bring up topics of concern. What minority professional organizations, such as the National Society of Hispanic MBAs or Women in Technology International, does it support?

A great way to test a company's commitment, says Marian Carrington, co-founder of Carrington & Carrington, a Chicago-based diversity executive-recruiting firm, is to ask if it has linked diversity goals to the bottom line. "A company that's serious," she says, "ties diverse hiring and retention into its executive- bonus plan."

Targeted Questions

Members of specific minority groups may have to look around more carefully and ask more targeted questions, says Joseph McCormack, managing partner of Los Angeles diversity recruiting firm McCormack & Associates. "You can ask if the company has gay- or lesbian-affinity groups, if same- sex partners are welcome at social events, and if the company's benefits plan extends to domestic partners," he says.

Once you've established that the organization's environment welcomes diversity candidates, you must asked pointed questions about your own future there. Does the employer have minority senior executives? "You may not want to be a pioneer," says Mr. McCormack. What are your own chances for advancement? Mr. Matthews says he asked interviewers at KPMG about their key business challenges and how the affirmative-action position he was offered fits into those challenges. "Talk to other diverse people within the company," he says, "and ask them frank questions about minority promotions."

And once you've landed a job in the right environment, says Mr. McCormack, you can be sure of one thing: Your next job search will be easier. "Things are changing," he says, "and companies are recognizing they can't write off whole segments of the population. A new generation of managers is assuming leadership positions, and they're bringing in more progressive people. At some point soon, minority hiring won't even be an issue."

By Julie Bennett - Ms. Bennett is a free-lance journalist based in Northbrook, Ill., who specializes in recruiting, employment issues, e-commerce and franchising.