Diversity is Why at American Heart Associationby Michael Goldberg, Director of Talent Acquisition for American Heart Association

Diversity. How many times have you read or heard that diversity is the key to a company’s success? Most times you can turn to the good ole fashioned diversity statement in an organization’s careers page or a diversity message from the company’s CEO. Many employers believe the generic statements will bring diverse candidates into the workplace or that diversity is a one-size fits all approach. That simply is just not the case.

T he success to any organization’s diversity and inclusion initiatives involves two key areas of focus:

• Building diversity into the business plan and making it a part of how the organization does business every day. At the American Heart Association (AHA), we focus on our mission to improve cardiovascular health for all Americans by delivering culturally-competent programs to Women, Youth, Children, African Americans, Hispanics and Communities of Faith, thus impacting a broad portion of the diversity spectrum. Talent that joins this team have the unique opportunity to impact minorities and other communities of diverse backgrounds.

This is a true practice what we preach, which has far more impact than just posting jobs and hoping they will come.

• Building diversity and cultural intelligence in the workplace is also a key success factor. Our Diversity and Inclusion manager has created incredible opportunities to educate our employees and enhance our cultural intelligence. We do this through our annual Cultural Explosion Event, Explore the AHA Career Fair which focuses on diverse candidates, individuals with disabilities, LGBT, and veterans and our on-line diversity courses offered through our Learning Management System (LMS).

So when it comes time to building “diversity programs” for recruiting purposes, most people take the “if you build it they will come” methodology which is adding a diversity statement on their website and diverse candidates will just storm the gates.

Unfortunately, it just does not work that way. Diversity recruitment is in many people’s minds “something we have to do” whether you are a Federal Contractor or not.

In a recent poll conducted by DirectEmployers1

for the purposes of this article, 76% of the respondents have a diversity recruitment strategy in place. When asked how they measured diversity, there was a wide range

Diversity is Why at American Heart Association

of responses including diversity councils, diversity scorecards, and internal metrics to Affirmative Action Plans (91%) and EE0-1 reports (77%). I have some bad news for the people who responded…you are missing the most critical point. The best answer I saw that hit the nail on the head was hires.

You can have 800 diverse applicants across the candidate pool for the quarter, but if you have two hires in each of the EEO categories, that comes to a 2.5% diversity hiring ratio. Your efforts are admirable but

your efforts need to be adjusted to get the necessary results. According to the survey, the biggest area of success for employers who responded was in the Professional EEO category at 91%. The proof is in the numbers (See figure 1.1). Executives were at 21%, which in every article I read is still a major area of concern. One of the biggest surprises was that companies have seen only a 10% increase in service workers. While completely befuddling to me, the results may not have had a lot of service companies respond to the survey.

The most enlightening statistic was around the challenges in diversity recruitment efforts (see Figure 1.2). This should not surprise anyone. “Not Enough Resources—including time” was the top reason of all the challenges mentioned with “Geographic Location” coming in second.

Our time is so unbalanced with hiring managers and your manager breathing down your neck on candidates and filling jobs respectively. So…you can get busy dying on the vine by not doing anything about it or you can get busy building a meaningful diversity recruitment offering.

But how?Invest in a Diversity Recruitment Specialist, Coordinator, Manager (pick one). Each and every day you build a business case as to why the three to five candidates you presented are the most qualified, or during budget time you justify the need to purchase a new tool such as an ATS. So why can’t you build a business case for hiring a diversity subject matter expert to help your team and company attract and retain diverse candidates? Here are the numbers:

• Average salary of a Diversity Manager is $85-$90K plus another 10% in bonus so $98K.

• Average cost of a new applicant tracking system including implementation costs is $130 to $250K depending on the size of your company.

• Let’s say for simplicity you have five entry level sales openings. Those five sales people who left brought in $250,000/salesperson. If we use a formula for daily lost revenue: Annual Revenue Generated by the Typical Person in that Position/220 Annual Working Days, you will discover your group is losing $1,136 per person per day or almost $5,700 each day for all five. Anyone who tells you that is not real money—show them the numbers.

EEO categories with increase in number of hires

Figure 1.1 From the Diversity Recruitment Strategy Survey, September 2015 DirectEmployers (all rights reserved)

Diversity recruiting challenges

Figure 1.2 From the Diversity Recruitment Strategy Survey, September 2015 DirectEmployers (all rights reserved)

It is not rocket science—if you spent $98K for a Diversity Manager and that person could build relationships and attract diverse candidates to your open positions—the new diversity position would pay for itself.

So, you ask, what is AHA doing to attract diverse candidate? Actually, quite a bit. At AHA, we hired a Diversity Coordinator who is responsible for building relationships with our partners all over the United States, she has built a LinkedIn Group2 focused on attracting diverse candidates to attract diverse candidates in nonprofits. While the group is new, we are leveraging our Multicultural Markets leaders and our Diversity & Inclusion Manager to help feed content and generate discussion.

Has it worked? The short answer is yes. Unfortunately, I cannot share the results but can say that we have seen an increase in diversity hires over the last year in some of the categories. Fundraising or our sales force is the toughest nut to crack but hopefully our efforts will lead to an increase diverse fundraising hires this fiscal year.

First, we created a unique career fair called Explore the AHA Life Career Fair that we held in October 2014 and just wrapped on September 9, 2015. The focus of our fair was to educate our attendees on healthy eating, learning CPR, and many of our departments who came on site to conduct on-site interviews. Our career fair also featured three education sessions on successful job searches, staying healthy during your job search, and marketing yourself through the various social channels.

Our advertising focused on attracting different races, veterans and individuals with disabilities. In 2014, Dallas Mayo Pro Tem, Monica Alonzo3 cut the ceremonial ribbon to welcome over 450 attendees. Of the attendees, 75% were from one of the three diverse groups and we ended up hiring six diverse candidates and two veterans from the fair. 2015’s career fair was just as successful. While our attendance was down (a 3.1% unemployment rate

will do that), we ended up getting a higher quality of diverse candidates. To date, we have hired 10 candidates for our open positions and all are diverse. The great news is we still have ten diverse candidates in process now. This speaks to our efforts and dedication to hiring a diverse pool of candidates and that quantity of candidates is not as good as quality of candidates.

AHA also participated in a job interviewing forum at the USBLN4 conference that was held in Austin. We had the chance to interview five candidates who were interested in working for the American Heart Association. We have submitted three of the five candidates to specific affiliates for further consideration.

Using SHRM Enterprise Solutions5, AHA worked with the team to add three unique  career websites6 aimed specifically at attracting and engaging a diverse audience that were targeted toward their job skills.

Now you may say, how does a new website help? Note that www.heart-veterans.jobs or www.heart-diversity.jobs is as much of a website on the internet as www.heart.org. However, content specific websites (in this case veterans.jobs or diversity.jobs) yields better page 1 returns than www.heart.org/ careers. In broadcast terms, this approach is referred to as “narrowcasting” content to the audience you want to attract and engage. For the Internet, this is what websites with targeted content enable you accomplish.

Why?

Our careers page cannot target the audience as well as heart-veterans.jobs. Google is reading 2 websites: one that is heart.org and the other that is heart-veterans.jobs. These 2 websites are targeted for different search results. For veterans & jobs, heart.org is nowhere to be found. Create a new website of heart-veterans.jobs, and there it is. Google doesn’t read microsites or niche career websites—they read websites. And when you do, Google will know what to do.

Over the last six months, we’ve made these websites meaningful and focused by creating content showcasing AHA’s commitment to each of the valuable candidate pools. Each website has its own “home page” delivering the message we want front and center. Job postings are automatically populated on a daily basis with robust job search functionality.

Diversity is Why at American Heart Association

Created a unique career fair

Participated in a job interviewing forum at the USBLN conference

Create six career websites to attract and engage a diverse audience

Google doesn’t read microsites or niche career websites—they read websites. And when you do, Google will know what to do.

It is not an either or statement, it is all three. So I ask, what is your next move and how will you get there?

By placing specific language in our job postings and linking to these sites from our main website, we are already winning page 1 search results7 at significant search providers such as Google. This strategy enables AHA to be where this targeted audience frequently starts their job search from. In turn, we have seen a nice spike in visits and click through conversion rates across the country indicating acceptance from this audience to the strategy.

AHA is currently investigating some additional resources to drive more traffic to these websites through social. Some items we are currently using as well as some ideas for the future include:

• Engaging in paid social media marketing.

• Increasing unpaid social media marketing dedicated to the http://heart-diversity.jobs website.

• Emailing hiring managers or company ambassadors to encourage them to share links to the career sites with

friends and family. (Provide text and imagery, with call-to-action to visit sites).

• Tapping into employees to share, especially relevant employee resource groups.

• Encouraging the sharing of site URLs into new hire onboarding.

• Sharing links and tagging relevant occupation and local organizations, such as student disability offices, chapters of groups like NSHMBA, BMBAA, student veteran chapters, PRSA, AMA, etc.

• Joining active veteran, disability and diversity groups on LinkedIn and Facebook.

• Creating more human feelings by adding personal bios, photos and stories via static pages. Like the cover images on The AHA Life: Careers page.

• Repurposing content.

In the end, you will only get the results if you put the time and effort into attracting candidates who are diverse, veterans and individuals with disabilities. The building blocks are:

• Generating executive support from your Board of Directors and C-Level executives who can lead the organization to build diversity and cultural intelligence.

• Creating impact in the diverse communities your company serves.

• Developing realistic and doable strategies to attract candidates.

• Understanding the habits of how your audience uses the Internet (search engines, social media, etc).

• Measuring your success along the way to build the business case to bring on a diversity.

• Specialist who can come in and be a value-added resource to your diversity recruiting efforts.

Diversity is Why at American Heart Association

1 DirectEmployers.org2 LinkedIn.com/grps/Diversity-in-NonProfits-8407303/about3 DallasCityHall.com/government/citycouncil/district6/Pages/default.aspx4 USBLN.org5 SHRMenterprise.jobs6 Heart-diversity.jobs; Heart-veterans.jobs; Heart-disability.jobs7 For example, a Google search of “jobs for veterans at AHA” produces a #1 AHA website search result

Authored by: Michael Goldberg, Director of Talent Acquisition for American Heart Association https://www.linkedin.com/in/dallasmichaelgoldberg