Recognize the benefits
Diversity helps your business in a very tangible way if you approach it correctly. A diverse work force will help you sell your products and services to a diverse customer base.
“The understanding of the markets you are targeting is always better if you have people from a similar background as your customers,” Camden says. “My son and daughter, who are teenagers, the marketing to them is infinitely more effective if it’s being guided by people of the same generation, as opposed to people who only know that generation through market research. Nothing replaces having people who understand those who you are serving: the customers and the markets.”
Kelly Services’ leaders have had to learn how to use diversity to serve new markets over the years. Many people who grew up in decades past probably remember the “Kelly girl” moniker, an informal term for a clerical staffer hired and placed by the company. For years, Kelly Services was synonymous with secretaries and office workers. But as the staffing needs of businesses evolved, Kelly Services had to evolve, too. Overtime, the company began supplying engineering and technology firms with staffing help. But there was a problem, and diversity was at the root.
“We at Kelly and throughout the industry believed that anybody who was good at recruiting for our established core areas could do an equally fine job recruiting individuals who were from all of these specialty areas,” Camden says. “It turned out that we and others were wildly ineffective at recruiting inside some of these specialty areas until we got to the point of realizing something that now seems simple. We thought, ‘Gee, maybe the people who run the engineering branch and do recruiting should be engineers. Maybe the people who do the recruiting for accountants should be accountants.’”
When Kelly Services started hiring engineers to recruit engineers and accountants to recruit accountants, the company’s growth in those areas gained momentum and the company’s leaders gained a new perspective on how a workforce with diverse backgrounds could help the company conduct business.
“If you go back to pre-Internet days, if someone was looking for an office clerical job, they would pick up the paper and look at the want ads,” Camden says. “But engineers don’t do that. That’s not how you find them. You had to understand what professional associations they belong to, what are their interests and hobbies. It changed where you placed your ads; it changed where you put your recruiting efforts.”