Spotlight for Recruiting Professionals

Organizations looking to enhance their diversity recruiting efforts would do well to position themselves as a diversity-conscious employer, and raise awareness about their focus on diversity and inclusion.

Results of NACE’s Class of 2017 Student Survey Report found that, overall, students who planned to immediately enter the work force after graduation said they are most interested in jobs or employers that give them the opportunity to develop their skills. However, by gender and race, students felt very differently about the importance of working for a diversity-conscious employer.

Specifically, this factor was very important to African-American men and women, Hispanic-American women, and Asian-American women. For African-American men and women, the preference to work for a diversity-conscious employer was so intense that it was the single most important of all 18 job/employer attributes, superseding even the opportunity to develop job-specific skills. (See Figure 1.)

NACE’s Class of 2017 Student Survey was conducted from February 15 to April 30, 2017; more than 21,000 students at colleges and universities nationwide took part, including 4,200 graduating seniors. Participating schools will find a complimentary copy of the report in MyNACE > Research Reports; an executive summary is available on NACEWeb.

Figure 1: Preference for a diversity-conscious employer vs. the opportunity to develop job-specific skills, by race and gender