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How many times have you seen a report where today’s top tech companies admit to struggling to recruit top diverse talent? Only 2% of Google’s workforce is black, and at Twitter, just 3% of the workforce is black.
But they are missing a virtually untapped talent pool: 101 HBCUs, which produces 22% of black college graduates with bachelor’s degrees in the U.S. A Gallup Poll that surveyed over 60,000 college graduates from a range of all colleges ranked HBCU graduates as having the highest rate of financial, career, and emotional well-being of college graduates.
Black college graduates face an unemployment rate that is two times the average of their white counterparts, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Nicole Tinson-Johnson is an HBCU graduate and co-founder of Jobs R 4 U, a nonprofit that aims to help minorities find jobs, with her husband, Dennis Johnson. By working to start their partnership with corporations to find job placements for HBCU students and alumni, the couple discovered why many of these companies are not recruiting from HBCUs. “We began reaching out to companies to say, ‘Hey–we are working to increase diversity within your industry by connecting you to talented students and graduates from HBCUs.’ Companies would either tell us they were already connected to HBCUs because they recruit from Howard and Spelman, or they didn’t know what an HBCU was at all.”
Slowly, some of the top tech companies are beginning to recognize the potential. Google, Goldman Sachs, and Spotify have created initiatives to recruit or engage with talent from HBCUs. Still, most of the recruitment efforts for black grads are concentrated on just a few top HBCUs.
Read the full article about low recruitment from HBCUs by Brittney Oliver at Fast Company.