LinkedIn's Focus on Recruitment Diversity Heats Up
By Tess Curle Taylor, PHR, CPC
Diversity in the workplace has become a hot topic for many organizations, especially when it comes to recruitment practices. LinkedIn is actively heating up its focus on diversity in recruitment. The company released its statistics on workplace diversity earlier in the month of June and it admitted that it has plenty of work left to do in bringing diverse employees onboard.
Here are some of the findings of this 2014 report on diversity in hiring and recruitment.
Gender and Ethnicity Statistics
In the LinkedIn report, the company separated its employees based on gender and ethnicity to conduct the report. The company employs 39 percent females and 61 percent males across the globe. Currently, there are 5,400 employees working for LinkedIn in offices all over the world.
In the ethnicity category, LinkedIn only published its percentages for its employees in the United States. Fifty-three percent of U.S. employees are white, 38 percent are Asian, four percent are Hispanic and two percent are African-American. The other two categories were labeled as two or more races and other.
LinkedIn provided the following reasoning for only listing its U.S. employees in the ethnicity statistics from Pat Wadors, the Vice President of Global Talent:
“You’ll notice that our gender breakdown is representative of our global employee base, while ethnicity is U.S. only. That’s because legal complexities prohibit us from asking about the ethnicity of employees in many countries outside of the U.S., so accurately reporting that data is not currently possible.”
Initiatives and Programs
After investigating their diversity of employees, LinkedIn created new initiatives and programs to help make their workforce as diverse as possible. LinkedIn has partnered with Year Up, DevelopHer, Anita Borg Institute, Management Leadership for Tomorrow and Out & Equal Workplace Advocates.
Year Up is an initiative that helps urban young adults receive the training and skills needed to reach their potential in higher education and careers.
DevelopHer is a program that LinkedIn created a couple of years ago. It was created to help women become engaged in the tech industry.
The Anita Borg Institute is an organization that focuses on women in computing. LinkedIn has partnered with this organization for years and even supports their annual Grace Hopper Conference.
Management Leadership for Tomorrow (MLT) provides African Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans with the skills, relationships and coaching needed to succeed in the professional world.
Out & Equal Workplace Advocates has a main goal of ending workplace discrimination of lesbian, gay, transgender and bisexual employees. LinkedIn sponsors the organization’s Out & Equal Workplace Summit, which will be held in the fall of 2014 in San Francisco.
LinkedIn decided to publish its diversity statistics in an effort to be transparent about its hiring practices and more accountable in its efforts to hire a diverse workforce. According to a Bloomberg article, this came just one month after Google released its hiring diversity data.
Image courtesy of Ambro / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
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