Increasing minority employment: Are you ready to recruit?

To increase employment from desired race or gender groups, employers nearly always first turn to recruiting from outside their organization. But a few years after such initiatives are undertaken, diversity numbers typically remain low or even decrease, turnover among recruits from the sought-after groups is high, and the efforts are threatened by their recurrent cost. Employers need to break this fruitless cycle by thinking more strategically. Without an inclusive organizational climate that retains and fully utilizes minority employees after hire, simply recruiting more such employees will not lead to sustainable changes in workforce demographics. Drawing on empirical research, this paper describes six “red flags” that identify workplaces not ready to recruit. Only after organizational changes address the deficiencies identified by the red flags will the time for minority recruitment be at hand. But by then special focused recruitment may not be necessary; when employers change their workplace cultures to become truly inclusive, word gets around.