Panelists included:
- Deborah J. Crable, director of public relations and marketing for Kennedy-King College, one of the seven City Colleges of Chicago. Crable is also the chairman of the National Alliance of Market Developers (NAMD).
- Janis Robinson, director of diversity and strategic collaborations with the Alzheimer’s Association, the largest private non-profit funder of Alzheimer research.
- Sandra Finley, CEO of the League of Black Women, a national organization that provides strategic leadership research to social issues that impact black women at home, at work and in their communities.
- Melinda Kelly, the executive director of the Chatham Business Association.
Founder and President Gregory T. Hinton established the Chicago Association of Minority Recruiters in 1989. This network of professionals focuses on developing the careers of minority human resource professionals.
Survey: Minority Executives Fall Behind
Minority recruiters need a network of support, and minority executives need more minority recruiters.
A few years ago, Rev. Jesse L. Jackson and The Wall Street Project commissioned Wesley, Brown & Bartle (WB&B) — a national executive search firm with one of the highest records of management diversity in corporate America — to survey the employment status of Black and Latino executives in the U.S. WB&B released their survey results just last year, and the results were not good.
“Despite the advance of widely publicized corporate diversity programs since we last surveyed them five years ago, lingering myths, de-selective biases and an impaired hiring process have impacted far more severely on African-American and Latino executives than their white counterparts,” said Wesley Poriotis, chairman of Wesley, Brown & Bartle.
In 2008-2009, Poriotis’ firm courted Fortune 500 companies where they “presented in excess of 300 highly qualified minority candidates across multifunctions and multilevels.”
Less than two percent were hired in line and operations roles that affect the company’s bottom line.
The struggling economy made the overall situation even worse.
“Blacks and Latinos have fallen further behind as corporations downsized during the past three years,” Poriotis explains, “causing a particularly poignant hit on affected executives of color who face a disproportionate challenge for re-employment.”
Translation: Last hired, first fired.
The end result: multiple interviews, but few job offers. “When an equally credentialed Black or Latino executive is one of three finalists for an open position,” argued Poriotis, “their respective chance of getting the job offer is not one in three but one in 33.”
