Hiring Black Tech Talent - A Case Study in Success Leveraging Diversity Recruitment Events with HBCU CONNECT

A wealth of diverse tech talent is available when organizations broaden their hiring strategies.

With businesses struggling to find and keep technical talent, companies cannot afford to leave any stone unturned. If you are a representative from a company seeking to diversify the talent pools your company taps into to recruit technical professionals, keep reading!

In this article, I want to share a bit of the success we have seen tech companies have when leveraging Diversity Recruitment events in partnership with HBCU Connect. Simply put, Diversity Recruitment events are one of the most effective ways of finding and attracting top African American and Latinx talent!

If you're not already familiar, HBCU CONNECT is an online platform that allows HBCU Alumni and Students to connect with each other and with opportunities from organizations looking to hire diverse talent.

We organically got involved in Diversity Recruitment and specifically, hosting diversity-focused hiring events as a result of partners asking us to help them reach this untapped audience of educated African Americans. We came up with the idea and concept for hosting after-work networking events after a conversation with former Microsoft HR leader Sean Kelley (he / him) . Sean asked us to propose a way to ensure that the talent in our database got a real opportunity to connect with hiring managers and recruiters within Microsoft.

We hosted our first event back in 2010 and have steadily increased the number of events we have hosted with different partners. We continue to analyze the results from past events to make sure future events meet the goals of our partners.

But let's get into the results, specifically within the tech space!

HBCU CONNECT has conducted Virtual and In-Person recruitment events for several technology companies, and we have achieved outstanding outcomes for both attendees, as well as sponsoring firms.

Do People Show Up?

Companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, LinkedIn, Intel and ServiceNow have partnered with us on In-Person and Virtual events that average well over 100 Black and Latinx Professionals at each event!

How Do We Insure The Right People Attend?

The value of partnering with an organization like HBCU CONNECT is that we not only set up the marketing for the event to attract the right talent, but we also will source the right talent and screen the talent to make sure attendees are a fit based on the opportunities available at the sponsoring company. It is important for you, as the company sponsoring the event, to clearly define the types of professionals you are looking to hire prior to getting started. Ideally you'll want to have at least 2 to 3 talent profiles, but it could be more or less depending on your hiring needs.

Can We Hire Tech Talent from a Diversity Focused Event?

While we like to keep the actual hiring numbers for specific companies confidential, we have seen all of the aforementioned tech companies hire larger numbers of African American and Latinx professionals from our hiring events.

If done right, with regards to your preparation prior to the event, you can line up anywhere from 10 to 40 interview loops after a successful hiring event. In one particular In-Person event hosted in Charlotte, North Carolina, one of our partners made 17 hires after setting up next day interviews after our event. These hires were ALL Diverse Tech Professionals with backgrounds in I.T., Software and Network Engineering.

But Is There Really Enough Black Tech Talent Out There?

Surprisingly to some, but a common theme for us, is that when we host an event specifically targeting Black and Brown Tech Talent, we get more interest and engagement than when hosting events in any other industry! For example, we have recently hosted events for Marketing Professionals, Finance Professionals, and even Educators, yet we see more professionals sign up for our tech events at a faster rate and higher rate of attendance! We are still researching the "why" for this phenomenon, but this creates a unique opportunity for companies looking to hire more diverse tech talent.

Even events focused on hard to fill Software Engineering roles in Artificial Intelligence and Data Science see high attendance and interest from our audience of Black and Latinx professionals. One such event, hosted just last year with LinkedIn, attracted over 790 experienced Black and Brown Tech Professionals, resulting in over 50 interview loops and some happy attendees that joined the team. Check out this testimonial from Ruona Dibie , a Software Engineer that joined the team at LinkedIn...

Hosting a Diversity Recruitment event is a valuable opportunity to grow your under-represented talent pool and make a lasting impression as an employer of choice. Meeting candidates through these events also lets you see what’s not on their resume, like their curiosity, their personality, or any useful similarities or differences they might be able to contribute to your team.

Enable a Diverse Workforce in your Organization.

If you are an employer and would like to sponsor a Diversity Recruitment event in collaboration with HBCU CONNECT, Contact Us! We will work together to host a customized recruitment event.