The following is a guest post by Nathan Parcells.
Diversity is currently one of the most talked about issues in the HR world — and for good reason. Building a diverse team is seen as an increasingly critical part of building a successful company, essential to both creating better and more global products as well as establishing a work environment that is ideal for employees who want to connect and grow with people of different backgrounds.
While working in a diverse office is important to the current generation of employees, it is perhaps even more important to students, accustomed to growing up in a global environment. According to an InternMatch survey of more than 100,000 students, company culture is the third most important criteria when selecting an internship, behind “portfolio building” and “career exploration.” That said, building a diverse company and internship program is often easier said than done.
Why is fostering corporate diversity so challenging?
Different industries struggle with diversity in different ways. The tech industry, for example, has a huge mountain to climb when it comes to hiring women and minority students, because so many of these students drop out of the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields before they reach college. In fact, the Level Playing Field reports African-American and Latino students combined represent only 15 percent of all AP test takers in physics and calculus.
In the accounting field, a similar but different issue exists. While a large number of minority students study business, there is a lack of successful black accounting leaders for students to look up to. In fact, Diversity Inc. reports that, at CPA firms in 2010, only three percent of professional hires were African-American and only one percent of partners were African-American. Ultimately, in this field, many students of color have a hard time envisioning the pathways to success because so few individuals that look like them are currently holding high-level positions.
Diverse college programs lead to diverse companies.
While most companies are looking to change their diverse makeup in a number of different ways, many are viewing their college programs as one of the most critical places to start, for a few reasons:
1. For many companies, an internship program dictates the future DNA of their workforce. Internships have now become the number-one way in which companies make entry-level hires, with around 70 percent of students being offered internships. Hiring diverse interns and diverse new grads is one of the most effective ways to create a sustained shift towards a more diverse workforce.
2. For most students, an internship is the first exposure to a particular industry or field. By neglecting to make diversity an integral part of a company’s intern hiring process, it increases the likelihood that students not traditionally represented in a specific field will never develop the skills, interest, and footing to succeed.
3. Students and a company’s youngest hires will ultimately be the biggest drivers of change within an organization. They come in without deep knowledge of how an industry should or shouldn’t work. They bring the youthful energy needed to disrupt norms. By making diverse hires at the intern level, supporting these employees throughout their career, and empowering them to make an impact within a company, significant internal change can be accomplished.
Final thoughts:
Building corporate diversity is a difficult task for any company. Most of the time, when an industry has a diversity issue, it is caused by both internal norms that can and should be changed, as well as systemic challenges that are much harder to change and often must be tackled collectively by an industry rather than by any given company or hiring manager. That said, students are incredibly passionate about working with peers who have a variety of backgrounds, so this issue is only becoming more important. For companies interested in building a more diverse company, focusing on hiring a diverse set of interns and new grads is a great strategy, as these students can become future leaders and internal advocates.
About the Author:
Nathan Parcells is co-founder and CMO of InternMatch, a leading site for helping companies hire amazing interns and students find amazing internships. InternMatch was started as a social venture with the goal of helping students of all backgrounds be able to find great internships regardless of connections. InternMatch’s Diversity and Internship Hangout is the first ever event to have top speakers from different industries share insights about their diversity initiatives. InternMatch now has over 5 million annual student visitors, and Nathan’s writings have been featured in Forbes, VentureBeat, the WSJ, Washington Post and more.
