Illustrator JULIETTE BORDA Title: GARDEN VARIETALS

According to proprietary research commissioned by The New York Times, companies that brand themselves as "diversity friendly" have a competitive advantage in the recruiting marketplace. Job seekers and recruiters in the survey overwhelmingly agreed that diversity initiatives, no matter how diversity is defined, are "extremely important." The research, conducted on behalf of The New York Times Job Market by the Beta Research Corporation, surveyed attitudes toward corporate diversity initiatives among 500 nationwide job recruiters, and from 350 minority job seekers from three Community Connect Web sites: BlackPlanet.com, AsianAvenue.com and MiGente.com. The job seekers were adults currently looking for a job, or planning to look for a new one in the next six months.

Here are some of the key findings of the survey:

Among recruiters:

• At organizations that have diversity programs, 92 percent of hiring managers said that senior management the organization strongly supports diversity as a goal.
   
• Nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of the hiring managers the survey said their organization's diversity efforts are extremely or very successful.
   
• While just over half of the hiring managers in the study con-sidered workplace diversity to be of benefit to a company's business performance, an even higher percentage (70 percent) of hiring managers at the companies with diversity programs said this.
   
• Minority candidates are in great demand: 67 percent recruiters are actively involved in diversity recruiting.

Among job seekers:

• Most job seekers (91 percent) said that diversity programs make an organization a better place to work.
   
• Nearly all minority candidates (97 percent) would rather work in a diverse workplace than not.
   
• In their current job searches, 97 percent of minority candidates said that opportunity for advancement and good benefits are extremely or very important to them.
   
• A company's image is critical to attracting minority candidates: 65 percent of minority candidates said that an organization's reputation for supporting workplace diversity was an important factor in their decisions of where to apply.

Among the job seekers in the survey, 91 percent of the respondents said they believed diversity programs "make an organization a better place to work," even though just one in four (26 percent) have participated in a diversity program.

When minority job seekers were asked to rate the importance of the different factors that would determine whether they would apply to an organization, the second most popular response, after having a reputation for supporting work-life balance, was having "a reputation for hiring and cultivating diverse employees."

"One of the most interesting findings of this research is that both hiring mangers and job seekers think workplace diversity is very important -- for their own reasons," explains Wendy Robinson, the advertising research director in charge of all the Job Market research at The New York Times. "The minority candidates we talked to in our survey, both women and men, told us that they are paying attention to whether a company has programs in place that will cater to their needs. Some of those needs have nothing to do with them being minorities, and others have everything to do with it. The bottom line is they want to feel that the company is supporting their needs. One of those needs is that the company has a reputation for hiring and cultivating diverse talent."

ALSO:
Creating a culture of inclusion
Survey: Diversity initiatives critical to job seekers

CORPORATE PROFILES
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Blue Cross Blue Shield
Citizens Bank
New York Times Co.
Raytheon
TJX Companies, Inc.

This special advertising feature is sponsored by participating advertisers and ran in edited form on September 14, 2003 in The Boston Globe Magazine and The New York Times Magazine. It was written and reported by Jason Forsythe and did not involve the reporting or editing staff of The Boston Globe or The New York Times. © 2003 The Boston Globe.