Diversify Your Recruitment Advertising

HR Magazine, June, 2001 by Ruth E. Thaler-Carter

Diversity ads are becoming more visible in the recruitment business.

Spurred by growing recognition of the value of diversity in the workplace, recruiting ads are getting more diverse. HR recruiters find that focusing on diversity in recruitment ads helps to attract more employees from diverse arenas, while enhancing programs such as employee referrals by building internal morale and promoting the company culture.

Many of these diversity-oriented ads are moving out of venues targeted specifically to minority audiences to mainstream publications such as Business Week, Newsweek, Forbes, The New York Times Magazine and Working Woman, as well as The Washington Post and other prominent national publications.

Microsoft Corp. has developed a series of "Valuing Diversity" "advertorials "--short essays published in the opinion-editorial pages of respected newspapers around the county, as opposed to "people" ads in magazines. The ads tell a story, stating that 800,000 skilled technology jobs are going unfilled in the United States; that this shortage is "expected to worsen over the next few years" due to the rapidly increasing demand for information technology workers in both industry and government; and that leaders in high-tech companies, higher education and government "believe that continuing to expand diversity outreach efforts is a critical step toward addressing the shortage of skilled workers."

By using the editorial news-story format, Microsoft may be giving this campaign added weight and seriousness.

Other recent examples of noticeable diversity recruiting ads include full-page, full-color ads in major magazines for Pitney Bowes ("We're Interested in Genius ... not Genes ... Genius Is Diverse ..."), Prudential ("At Prudential, diversity has its rewards"), Morgan Stanley ("Diversity. It's Not an Obligation-It's an Opportunity") and the Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. ("... we believe that diversity is the cornerstone of a high performance organization ...").

Driving the Trend

More companies and organizations are making a point of highlighting diversity in their ads these days for two reasons, according to Patricia Digh, president of RealWork, a Washington, D.C.-based firm focused on diversity and globalization, and co-author of Global Literacies: Lessons on Business Leadership and National Cultures (Simon & Schuster, 2000). "They are competing for talent in a tight market, and they recognize that demographic shifts in the United States are going to dramatically change their marketplace in the next 20 years," she says.

In explaining Prudential's diversity ads, Monica Reed, manager of image and proactive sourcing at Prudential in Newark, N.J., says, "Our corporate culture is diverse, so we want recruiting to be diverse, because that brings a variety of new ideas and perspectives into the company. We also want to sell to a diverse audience, and someone who sees a recruitment ad that focuses on diversity may also become a customer."

At Microsoft, "through our use of diversity-focused ads, we hope to deliver the message to prospective candidates that Microsoft values diversity in the workplace and actively seeks to attract a wider diversity of candidates with the goal of creating an increasingly multicultural workforce," says La Vonne Dorsey, diversity recruiting manager. That makes sense for a company that produces business and personal software products for a global marketplace. "We want to make sure that we are sensitive to our customers' needs [and] the best way to do that is to ensure that we have a diverse group of people contributing to the development of our products and delivering our customers' services."

Other companies agree. "All across the United States, market conditions are causing big business to rethink diversity recruitment and retention practices as factors critical to success," according to the most recent Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) survey of recruiting and retention methods used by Fortune 500 companies.

Advertising venues are capitalizing on this new trend. Two years ago, for instance, the Baltimore Sun started offering employers a special "diversity" logo to highlight their help-wanted ads. "It was going like gangbusters," says Carol Dreyfuss, communications manager for the Sun. "The original program was based on an expressed need from ad agencies and individual clients as a way to promote and meet their goals in diversity."

But the Sun's program, like all diversity advertising, needed to change to stay fresh. By now, "the novelty has worn off and it's no longer working. People are going into niche publications instead, so we are looking at revamping the program and the logo" to retain the paper's commitment to promoting diversity, Dreyfuss notes.

How It Works

For companies that want to "diversify" their advertising, the first step is to find out the target audience of the advertising venue before they place an ad in it. "We identify the audiences from which we want to attract candidates, and we research the publications and web sites to ensure that those resources touch those target groups," Dorsey explains. "We then create ads that tell our story." One such example reads: "As Microsoft ventures into new gaming, hand-held and ecommerce arenas, opportunities abound throughout the U.S. for diverse, bright professionals who are passionate about their work. ... To make software that enriches cultures around the world, we are committed to hiring people from cultures around the world."