Guide to Diversity Recruiting: They Only Want You When You’re Young
Part I:
As presentations wrapped up, the PwC professionals looked around the room and asked for questions from the student audience. The typical questions came up about culture, work, and whatnot. Finally, the mic in the audience passed to the final volunteer. She stood up and spoke into the mic. “I noticed that you have a lot of professionals representing your firm today, why don’t I see anyone that looks like me? I look around and I don’t see any Black professionals here,” said the student. The room went dead silent as the panelists paused, unsure how to continue. Finally, one panelist picked up her microphone and offered the standardized corporate answer of her diverse identity, being ¾ white and ¼ Tahitian, and feeling welcomed into the many affinity groups within the firm. Immediately, the panelists began to wrap up and rushed along to the next activity of the event. Despite the Q&A portion coming to an end, the student’s question was never answered, but it deserves to be. Most if not all elite firms have silent hierarchies and dynamics that few know about until they join. As an outsider, you can’t ask and most people will not tell you. What do you need to learn and how will you learn it if people aren’t straightforward with you?
During the start of my sophomore spring semester in March of 2023, I was extended an invitation to visit PwC’s 53-story, 218.5 meter skyscraper, home to their Downtown Los Angeles offices. I was ecstatic because the opportunity to visit corporate offices was not common to those outside USC’s Marshall Business School or its clubs. I arrived downtown, checked into PwC Explore, and was shown to a large room with about 50 other students from USC, UCLA, and LMU. We quickly got a warm introduction from the firm and presentations and activities commenced for the day. Although the controversial question that came up was quickly addressed (or dismissed), it stayed with me all the way through to accepting a summer offer with the firm and becoming a campus recruiting ambassador myself.
To start to understand the topic of DEI in corporate recruiting, the topic of homophily comes up. Homophily is the idea that people tend to connect with others who have many similarities to them. This happens in recruiting when managers hire those they like. How well they like candidates is based on how well they can relate to those candidates. This becomes a problem when historically, wealth and positions of power have been kept within the circle of white men in this country. White men seldom face any employment discrimination, in contrast to groups like Black or Hispanic people. Simply put, they know these roads because they built these roads. This is how top positions at elite firms became filled with predominantly white men. As our society evolved to become more inclusive, it became noticeable that firms employed widely for their human capital needs yet managerial and executive positions stayed reserved for white men.
To address this problem of a lack of diversity, firms began heavily marketing their commitment to DEI. In 2021, diversity jobs exploded as firms scrambled to ramp up their image. Just 2 years later, thousands of DEI jobs were cut due to falling demand.
However, the rise of DEI left an enduring legacy of campus recruiting programs to help historically marginalized groups into certain careers and positions. This manifests in diversity campus recruiting events such as USC’s Black Career Fair and PwC’s Women’s Consulting Experience Informational Session. At these events, students compete for internship spots specifically designated for diverse candidates. In a commitment to equity, firms also sometimes give easier interviews with less technical questions to diversity candidates. This considers possible disadvantages diverse candidates may have faced due to their backgrounds.
In order for DEI recruiting programs to make a meaningful difference, firms need to invest in the careers of their diversity hires. Whether this is happening is a rather complicated answer… as many answers in the corporate world are. For example, Black employees make up about 7% of managers in the private sector, according to a recent McKinsey study. For context, McKinsey is an elite consulting firm, considered to be the best in the world. Ironically, Zippia finds that Black employees make up only 10.8% of McKinsey and McKinsey’s current global office leadership page features only 3 Black executives out of 51 (5.8%). It’s clear that firms like McKinsey are not properly investing in their diverse talent pool to help develop members into being the firm’s future leaders.
McKinsey recruits almost exclusively at elite schools they target, USC not quite qualifying for this category. Notably, McKinsey is not interested in the general talent pool at USC as they never show up to our flagship career fair. However, they will be in attendance at diversity events at USC such as the Black Career Fair and USC OWN IT’s Career Fair. McKinsey is only one of the many firms scrambling to reinvent their image as diverse and progressive in this way.
Meanwhile, in the banking world, Goldman Sachs made headlines this month for losing many of its top female executive talent. Internally, one of the reasons why this happened is because the Board of Directors did not seriously consider them as possible successors to the current CEO and or place them in leadership positions for revenue generating divisions of the company. Additionally, many women have come out over the years, exposing rampant misogyny and racism within Goldman Sachs. In a 2022 memoir about her time at Goldman Sachs, former Managing Director Jamie Fiore Higgins details being mentally and physically abused by leaders within the firm. All her concerns she brought up to HR were swept under the rug which led to her voluntarily quitting her job.
In the event that diversity candidates are considered for front-office or high-paying divisions, are firms really investing in their success or are they just a point for an end-of-year DEI report? “I was getting paid well but it seemed like all the employees were being passive aggressive to our internship cohort on a daily basis,” said Edward Chanquin, a junior at the Iovine and Young Academy at USC.
Chanquin worked for 2 summers as a Software Development Intern at Amazon through a national nonprofit helping Black, Latinx and Native American talent to secure high-trajectory jobs. He recounts being given busy work that did not require him to write a single line of code all summer. “They didn’t care about our professional development and resented us because we were diverse hires”, said Chanquin. He and many of his peers were able to get interviews at similar caliber firms after Amazon during their junior year but many struggled to get past the technical interviews, requiring skills that should have been cultivated during their summer internships.
Going back to the infamous question from PwC Explore, the student raises a valid concern about why she didn’t see Black professionals in the room representing PwC. For students belonging to underrepresented groups, it’s important to take the time to learn what they won’t tell you.
An added challenge is that few professionals at the informational sessions and coffee chats will be honest because it’s not polite conversation to talk about pay and hierarchy. I learned what I know now from combing through Reddit and Fishbowl where people could voice their opinions anonymously. I also learned from conversations with close friends who have witnessed the internal corporate dynamic play out. This is difficult information to come by but it’s important to do the research and equip yourself with the information you need to make informed choices from the beginning.
In the age of worker empowerment, we should all pick up our own microphones and seek to understand. This knowledge isn't just power, it's a pathway to advancement in our careers. Let's take the initiative to understand and empower ourselves, turning insight into action into meaningful change.
Part II:
I chose to write using this genre because I wanted to reach college students and young professionals. As a college student, I prefer to Google for articles and pick the most interesting or relevant headlines to learn about a topic that I am interested in. As much as I’d like to say that I review literature and look for academic readings, it’s just not practical for me. Most of my news nowadays comes from following news sources on social media and reading articles with headlines that catch my eye. I reason that it is the same for young professionals who need their information quick and convenient as well. I wanted this to be relevant for and appeal to college students and young professionals so I chose to write an op-ed.
To write this piece, I referenced Harvard’s guide on writing an op-ed. Op-eds are known for having many distinctive stylistic and formatting conventions. First, it is important to have a title that peaks the reader’s interest. The goal is to make it interesting, shocking, or controversial so that readers will click on the article to read it. I never ended up elaborating on “They Only Want You When You’re Young” but I leave it up to interpretation by the reader. Reading through the article, I intend for the audience to find their own meanings in the title. It could mean that firms only want you because you’re a diverse candidate early in your college years and reserve their flagship internship that leads to a full-time position for general candidate pools. It could also mean that they want you for their human capital needs early on in your career but will not promote you later on. My main intention was for the title to be clickbait that peaks people’s interests.
Additionally, an op-ed features an intro paragraph with a strong hook. I wanted to throw the readers right into my personal anecdotes that sparked my curiosity for the topic. It has the shock factor that I am looking to convey to capture the reader’s attention. The topic of the piece is also stated in my first paragraph, although it doesn’t need to be. I highlighted that the piece is about what students should know about corporate attitudes and beliefs around diversity recruiting and how to obtain this information that is not readily available. I wanted to convey something tangible and useful that readers will get out of this and that comes towards the end of the piece after the journey I guided them through with my writing.
Another defining element of the style of an op-ed is a clearly defined point of view and a coherent argument all throughout the piece. I defined my topic in the first paragraph and presented a series of ideas that speak to the overarching theme of what is not commonly known and hidden by firm strategies for DEI and recruiting. The goal was to have these ideas be well explained with the proper supporting evidence and transition in a way that makes sense.
Formatting wise, each paragraph represents a cluster of ideas that relate closely to one another and each of my clusters present only 1 or 2 ideas with supporting evidence if necessary. I sometimes also divided paragraphs up for readability because they were bulky and the words started to blend into one another.
Writers typically use op-eds to reach a wide and general audience. For example, the Daily Trojan features articles that are relevant to USC students, faculty, and staff. Major publications like the LA Times publishes articles for everyone. With this in mind, I added supporting evidence to the piece by linking to different articles and studies, instead of the usual quote and MLA citation for an academic audience.
This article can be relevant to a wide audience such as college career centers, diversity-promoting organizations, and talent professionals. However, I used this piece to address students and young professionals who may aspire to work at elite firms. I wanted this piece to be most useful for this audience who may not be familiar yet with these dynamics. I was once part of this audience and I still am since there is a lot more to learn. As a freshman, I didn’t have relationships with people who could teach me these things. I had no idea that these conversations and themes existed and were awaiting me as I entered the workforce. My intention is for this piece to reach aspiring and young professionals like myself by sharing my experiences and perspectives.