By Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site
For years, many employers resisted hiring minorities and other diverse candidates. The reasons were many, but one that was often cited was that they wanted to hire the “best” candidates, and giving preference to diverse candidates went against that.
Today, it is widely accepted that diversity has significant, bottom-line benefits to employers:
- Companies with diverse management teams have 19% higher revenues.
- Diverse companies are 1.7 times more likely to be innovation leaders.
- 67% of job seekers say diversity is an important factor when considering a company.
- 85% of CEOs say that having a diverse workforce improves their bottom lines.
But when people think of “diverse” candidates, they’re likely to think of people of color, women, military veterans, and people with disabilities. Sure, those are all important but another is whether the candidate is non-traditional. One of our employer customers, an accounting firm that historically hired just finance and accounting majors from elite schools, discovered that its best-performing entry-level hires went to second and even third-tier schools and graduated with majors like liberal arts. Why? Because the students from elite schools and elite majors often quit after a year while the non-traditional students stayed for five years and the employer discovered that it was easy to, in their words, “teach a candidate how to reach a balance sheet but impossible to teach them how to think critically”.
– Article courtesy of College Recruiter job search site, which believes that every student and recent graduate deserves a great career, and Steven Rothberg, its founder.
