Want to Recruit Top Latino Talent? Start Young
By Daryl C. Hannah
October 08, 2008
Keywords: Latino,
Latinos, Latino talent, recruitment, Latinos 2050, Verizon, top
50
Melvin Diaz, a sophomore at the
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, doesn't really know what he wants to do when
he gets out of school. He doesn't know if he wants to follow in his father's
footsteps and work for Verizon. But he is sure about one thing: "Verizon truly values
its Latino employees." And that's exactly the type of brand loyalty the company
wants to create with young Latinos.
By the
year 2050, more than
one in five working-age people
will be foreign-born, with nearly a
third of these individuals from Latino backgrounds. And while companies
know a successful succession and recruitment plan is critical, even the most
progressive companies on The 2008 DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity®
list have trouble recruiting top Latino talent.
In March, Verizon Communications,
No. 1 on the DiversityInc Top 50 and No. 2 on the DiversityInc Top 10 Companies for Latinos, hosted its
10th Annual Hispanic Support Organization (HSO) conference. This time, the
company invited Latino students, mostly children of employees, for its
first-ever HSO Youth Conference.
"A major component of the HSO is
scholarship, and we see this as a great way to build a relationship with our
youth and share some important information with them about leadership and
personal development, community volunteerism and how to build their financial
future," says Marc Soto, national president of the HSO.
Corporations are building a sense of
loyalty by equipping students with the necessary professional-development skills
to make it in the corporate world. Verizon dedicated an entire workshop session
to career advice on issues such as proper attire for the workplace, how to
handle being the only Latino in a corporate setting and what young Latinos can
do to become active in the community.
But Verizon isn't the only company
reaching out to students while they're young.
Deloitte,
No. 16 on the DiversityInc Top 50, offers information on careers in accounting
to public schools in inner cities and has a variety of programs specifically
targeting Black and Latino youth.
Fast-food giants McDonald's Corp.
and Yum! Brands, Inc. have long used scholastic promotions to target students.
Pizza Hut, which is operated under Yum! Brands, Inc., launched the BOOK IT!
program, which encourages reading. BOOK IT! started in 1985 and recently
celebrated its 50-millionth book donated to children in need.
Schools are also playing a key role
in helping corporations find talented Latinos.
Rutgers University, in partnership
with DiversityInc, has launched a pipeline program for inner-city Black and
Latino kids. The groundbreaking program, dubbed the Business Connections
Pipeline Program, creates financial and developmental avenues for corporations
to help urban schools maximize the potential of their students.
"We are a single-sex school and we
have a residence program for 75 students. But there are three times that many
students who need to live on campus, but we don't have the means," says
Principal Father Edwin Leahy of St. Benedict's Preparatory School in Newark, N.J. "Many of these students would not
have made it if they weren't able to step outside their neighborhood and
study."
Ernst &
Young, No. 17 on the DiversityInc Top 50, created a mentorship program with
a high school in Brooklyn,
N.Y., which has since increased its
retention and graduation rates by nearly 60 percent.
"There is so much
talent in these schools, but the approach to reaching the talent has to be
systemic," says Allen Boston, partner and Americas director of campus and
diversity recruitment at Ernst & Young. "That systemic change has to go
beyond helping individual schools, but must impact all schools."
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