The Internet has become a valuable tool to many recruiters over the last several years. With the growth of job boards as well as personal homepages, candidate information is all around us. It comes down to the simple skill of knowing how to find what you are looking for when using the Net. Finding diverse candidates has always been a goal of recruiters across the country, but using the Internet has been difficult, unless you know where and what you are looking for. Below are some suggestions of how you can locate diverse candidates using the Internet. The Old Way The way recruiters use to attract diverse candidates was by placing ads in diverse publications or contacting diverse organizations, hoping to get information from them on how they could get the word out to their members that they are hiring. Advertisements, as we all know, are effective for certain positions. But they often fall short in many job categories. Contacting organizations can be useful, but usually only at a local or regional level, and it can take quite a bit of time. Diversity Job Boards As the job market has changed, so have the faces of many job boards. In order to survive in the job board arena, you either need to be very large, with deep pockets, or you need to be specialized in a niche area, such as diversity. There are a number of sites out there that can help a recruiter easily identify qualified diverse candidates. Sites like LatPro, Asia-Net, IMdiversity, and Diversity Recruiting are just a few sites that have seen the need for diversity recruiting and now offer different services to recruiters that help them easily connect with different diverse backgrounds. By no means is this a complete list of sites, but rather a sampling of sites to give you an idea of what is available. To get a complete list of diverse sites, take a look in the 2002 edition of CareerXroads. Associations If diversity is what you are looking for, then many times you need to go no further than an association that is focused on diverse members. All you need to do is a little research to find these associations. Here are a few to get you started:
- NABA (National Association of Black Accounts)
- USHCOC (National Hispanic Chamber of Commerce)
- HACD (Hispanic Alliance for Career Development)
- ALPFA (Association of Latino Professionals in Finance & Accounting
When you are conducting a search using any search engine, you can usually use the acronyms of an association to easily identify a diverse candidate just by knowing what associations that they might belong to. This will greatly reduce the time it takes to source for diverse candidates. Colleges and Universities There are many colleges and universities that mainly appeal to diverse students. By knowing which colleges and universities these are, you can again easily identify diverse candidates just by knowing the makeup of a specific school. The following is a sample of colleges and universities that have a majority of diverse students:
- Spelman College
- Morehouse College
- Georgia State
- Morris Brown
- Florida A&M
- Hampton
- Mills College
Again, this only barely scratches the surface of the schools that are made up of a majority of diverse students and alumni. By using the tools and information that are available on the Internet, such as niche job boards, diverse associations, and colleges and universities, your search for diversity candidates will become much easier.