Diversity Identifiers

booleanstrings Boolean, Diversity 2 Comments

multiple identities

Due to the last few months’ global events, diversity hiring and diversity recruiting training are the two topics getting a lot – if not most – Social Media attention within our industry.

If your search includes a preference for reaching out to diverse candidates, expect it to take twice as long, unless you have built a diversity sourcing part of your toolbox. However, as you save some search templates, your job will become easier. Here is how to address the challenge of building up the necessary search templates library. (No paid tools are required.)

Diversity Sourcing is not Rocket Science. Nobody gets surprised any longer by seeing the “face” option in the image search applied to diversity sourcing. There are lots of Boolean Strings, and example image searches shared in blogs and Facebook Groups. However, covering all aspects of diversity sourcing for a given job opening – or across a company – can be a daunting task.

To fulfill it, you need to be methodical, creative, organized, and fluent in Excel. (It is quite a unique combination of personal traits!)

Coincidentally, three of our clients have just requested us to source for specific kinds of diversity (plus, of course, some location and experience requirements). Two Bay Area companies have chosen to target only two or three types of diversity out of dozens. The project of interest I want to tell you about is the third.

Navajo Nation | Visit Arizona

The third project is a search that requires candidates to:

  1. be well-connected in the American Indian community – preferably Navajo (!)
  2. work at a for-profit
  3. have been on multiple boards
  4. live in AZ.

(I am always grateful for unique projects!)

I do not know whether our Navajo Project can be called a “diversity search” (what would you say?). But sourcing techniques based on any aspects shown on the top image above, including ethnicity search, are quite similar. So is sourcing for this project.

I will write another post sharing some details of the third project as well as some reflections on the sourcing process structure. Please sign up at the text box on the right to be notified of future posts.

The good news is, you can set up your sourcing process and sometimes, even search templates, once, and later maintain, grow, and reuse the saved lists of queries no matter what you search for. (Also, these diversity searches are perhaps the only use case for keeping, sharing, and “saving” Boolean Strings.)

To help you start generating your custom search string library, I want to share a list of the latest diversity-related posts on my blog. Feel free to bookmark any of them.

Unsure how to get a list of association names to plug in? The best strategy is simply to Google various diversity types-serving organizations within the area and a relevant industry focus for at least a sizable part of employees. For that, you will be using Googling just like everyone else – looking at the first couple of results if at all.

You can usually expect to get a large volume of potential candidate matches while using the discovered memberships as keywords in an OR string. If that is the case, you might want to weed out any suspicious or unverified records (however you define them.) Then, upload results to Google docs, and you are done – unless you are responsible for messaging prospects as well. The latter would be an optional last step, depending on your sourcing agreement.

Please join me at our always-popular class, “Sourcing for Diversity,” on Tuesday, July 28th. Seating is limited. Support for all attendees is unlimited for one month. Take advantage of that!

Comments 2

  1. Pingback: Scrape X-Ray for Research Including Diversity - Diversity Employer

  2. Pingback: Scrape X-Ray for Research Including Diversity | Boolean Strings

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