With years of marketing experience in both the client and agency world, Melissa Van Rossum, the founder of MarketPro, believed she was hitting a glass ceiling due to her gender. This motivated her to start MarketPro in 1996. Ahead of her time, her goal was to help companies achieve a strong, diverse workforce by making sure top talent was selected upon abilities regardless of gender, race, culture, or ethnicity.
A diverse workforce gives your marketing department the necessary perspective to market more effectively. Having a diverse marketing team improves more than just messaging. The inclusion of different backgrounds and experiences helps marketers better understand their customers and target markets, and what is needed in a product or service. You need to know what to build first before you go-to-market. Companies that fail to properly incorporate diversity within their marketing team via a strong marketing recruitment process are less likely to build a connection with a portion of their customer base.
Having a recruitment process that prioritizes top talent and diversity for your marketing team is good business. Melissa Van Rossum, CEO of MarketPro, Inc, quotes, “In order to reach your target audience, you must first understand the audience.” The power of marketers who are able to emotionally align the brand with the customer leads to organizational strength and the ability to create brand preference. Therefore, organizations can not afford to ignore diversity when hiring.
If you are a company that has struggled to reach your audiences, now is the time to reevaluate your diversity recruitment process. When you include and focus on a diverse group of candidates for every open role while hiring the best candidates, you will ultimately end up with a diverse workforce that is a representative of your customers. In addition to understanding the impact of diversity, companies must make it a standard practice. Here are tips from a diverse marketing recruitment firm to better diversify your marketing team.
Diverse Marketing Recruitment Agency Highlights Key Diversity Practices Needed For Company Success:
Be Consistent
Companies that have great diversity policies but lack implementation will have the same issues in the near future. As top marketing leaders, you need to make sure you have the people, tools, and capabilities to implement the policies before it is established. Consecutively, you must ensure all policies are being enforced daily. Simply including the words “diversity” or diverse” without action will lower your credibility. For that reason, your diversity initiatives need a clear set of plans, goals, and actions.
Be Unbiased
Successfully achieving a diverse workforce is a difficult task. Unfortunately, the modern world of recruitment is often unconsciously biased. An award-winning psychologist, Dolly Chugh, states on the Ten Percent Happier podcast, “Bias is relevant in any area where we have an internalized association.” If you are not careful, having a group of recruiters with the same biased views can cause you to overlook great candidates in the market.
Be Resourceful
If you rely on external recruitment agencies, it is important to make sure your vendor is diverse and has a system in place to ensure diversity. Putting standards on your organization is the key to creating and enforcing diversity initiatives.
MarketPro’s team comes from a variety of backgrounds and is heavily comprised of accomplished women and minority recruiters. Long before the name, we have been utilizing a method that is now commonly referred to as the Rooney Rule. Our marketing recruiters conduct deep-dive interviews with around 50 – 60 candidates per search. To ensure diversity, our clients are presented 5 – 6 top talents with at least one female and one minority candidate. While the rule does not guarantee minorities or females will be the best fit for the position, it gives a diverse slate of talents a fair chance at the opportunity, allowing our clients to hire the best person. Implementing this process across all hires in your marketing department will ultimately lead to a diverse and talented team.
We can proudly say, with years of experience, that two-thirds of our executive placements are women and twenty-seven percent are minorities. The diversity that we aim for in our searches helps businesses incorporate concepts into their marketing strategies that they may not have considered otherwise. Top companies like Coca-Cola and Colgate-Palmolive who have made hiring diversity a priority have partnered with us on searches where they only wanted to consider diverse candidates. By conducting a specialized search for top diverse talent, we have allowed them to enhance their internal focus on diversity.
If your recruitment process has been lacking diversity, it is likely you do not have the right level of diversity on your team. Partnering with MarketPro can help you incorporate diversity into your business and will give your team a sharper competitive edge.
