How to Recruit Diverse Candidates, According to an HR Veteran

Dan Bartfield has worked in the human resources space for more than twenty years. Soon after graduating from Miami University with a degree in Marketing, Bartfield partnered with Jason Weingarten and co-founded EASE, a career services software platform. In 2008, the duo launched Yello, an early talent recruiting organization, where Bartfield currently oversees all sales and client success strategies.

Yello currently provides recruitment services to more than 100 of the Fortune 500 companies, including NCR, Toyota, and Salesforce.

Barfield says that one of the biggest focuses for early talent recruitment today is diversity. In fact, a Handshake Campus to Career report showed that 67% of students and recent graduates said that they would only work for a company with a strong culture built around diversity and inclusion.

“After the George Floyd murder it really became apparent that diversity was a huge focus in early talent recruitment,” Barfield told The Org. “So a year ago we decided to acquire WayUp, a diversity database system that is incorporated into Yello.”

A shift from physical events to virtual events

In the past, early talent recruiting focused heavily on physical events such as career fairs and on-campus events. This often led companies to focus all of their attention on a handful of handpicked schools for branding or prestige reasons, dismissing qualified candidates from different backgrounds. The acceleration of virtual recruitment events as a result of the pandemic has shifted this phenomenon.

“Yello always predicted the fact that eventually university recruiting or campus recruiting would be more virtual, the pandemic just sped it up dramatically,” Barfield said. “Companies can now market to a much more diverse group of students through our database.”

Another important factor Barfield wants companies to consider when hoping to hire diverse candidates is being able to tell those candidates a compelling story about the company, what they’re doing in the community and how they’re helping move society forward.

“You need to make sure that once a student has graduated from college or a boot camp that they will remember who you are,” he said.

Set clear goals, then use data to make hiring decisions

Barfield suggests that companies should be setting clear goals when it comes to knowing the type of talent they are trying to recruit.

“Once goals are set, we can make out how to make you successful with your goals through the data in our system,” Barfield said.

Yello’s diversity recruiting software provides organizations with diversity statistics and can assist organizations in marketing themselves to specific audiences.

“We track everything for reporting purposes, specifically diversity and hiring information,” he said. “You can go through our system and look at our data and it will let you know what you need in order to be successful in achieving your goals.”

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