Diversity Strategies for Workplace Diversity

This last couple weeks I’ve been working on a 15 page paper for a Wiley publication that I was asked to write about human resources, mobile, social media, and technology.  I’m not going to lie it was challenging getting back to the mindset of writing longer articles like I did with my book.  As a writer and blogger, most of my articles are 250-700 words unless I write something a little longer for a publication.  And while I was researching for the article which I will share with you as soon as I am able, I came across some good stats when it comes to engaging minority populations using technolog and mobile.  Much of the data in the current space is customer focused which is fine because chances are high that if a group of individuals are using mobile as a consumers, they are also likely to use mobile and social media as a job seekers and employee.

And since 36.6 million job seekers used social media as part of the job search in 2011, it’s also likely that this trend will continue.  Social media is every where as is technology like mobile devices, tablets, and smartphones.  While I’ve written about these mobile HR best practices before, I wanted to share some insights into mobile job seeker strategies for minority groups, particularly the Hispanic population.

Technology & Mobile to Reach & Hire Hispanic Workers

Mobile Career Pages.  The Hispanic community in particular are adopting mobile devices at a staggering rate.  In 2012, Hispanics in the U.S. are expected to spend $17.6 billion.  You read correctly, Hispanics in 2012 will spend $17.6 billion with a B.  A growing percentage of these new mobile users for this demographic use their mobile device as their primary tool to access the internet.  This means that having a mobile ready career page, website, and blog extremely important to be able to attract and recruit this minority audience.  In fact, this is the kind of statistic I think HR practitioners and recruiters who are looking to build their mobile career page especially those that are Affirmative Action Employers.  That goes for OFCCP and their internet applicant guidelines.

And by the way, it’s getting that AAP time again is it not?

Social Networking, Texting & Facebook as Diverse Candidate Source

Facebook as a Hispanic Recruitment Tool.  Of those in the Hispanic community that have a mobile device, 79% are accessing Facebook on their mobile device and 26% are clicking on advertisements online.  Your Facebook recruitment and employment branding strategy should consider catering to this specific demographic offering up ways to engage and resources available via Facebook.  The majority of the Hispanic demographic are downloading apps spoken in English but if you are aggressively targeting the Hispanic job seeker market, it makes sense to post updates and advertise in Spanish.  This shows them that you truly are a bilingual work environment that values cultural diversity.

Text Messaging as a Messaging & Engagement Tool.  I’ve long talked about engaging job seekers using text messaging and am currently working with a staffing firm as we develop a strategy to engage Hispanic workers who use mobile devices and texting as their primary communication tool.  For recruiters, we can push jobs to very specific job seekers, schedule job interviews, an notify them immediately via a universal messaging device, SMS.  Politicians in our upcoming 2012 election are taking advantage of this demographic and their preference to communicate via text messaging for news and information, and you, the employer can too.

Engage Other Minority Demographics.  While Hispanics are certainly leading the way for mobile useage in 2012, a data from Pew Research in September of 2011 looks at similar data points for African Americans when it comes to mobile and technology.  Thirty-three percent of African Americans own a cell phone with 23.9 million Internet users and 76% of those accessing social networking sites as well.  Clearly mobile and social networking technologies are growing in multiple demographic populations.

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