Opinion: Hispanic Professionals have become a rare commodity!
As stated by the U.S. Census, 78 million retiring baby-boomers will eventually generate approximately 35 million unfilled job openings in the next two decades. These job openings will eventually be filled by the growing crop of minority candidates, among them Hispanics. At present the ‘pipeline’ of available Hispanic professionals cannot meet the soaring demand of job openings. As a result, human resource departments have been working overtime to come up with successful ways to attract and retain the few bilingual Hispanic professionals available today.
Contrary to popular belief, the pool of available bilingual Hispanics with sufficient professional working experience continues to grow smaller not larger. Part of the reason is the increasing competition among corporations looking for similar Hispanic talent. Also, the pool of qualified candidates is shrinking because the majority of Hispanics are too young. According to the PEW Hispanic – www.PEWhispanic.org, the average age of 60 percent of Hispanics is just thirteen.
Their increasing quest for qualified candidates able to communicate effectively with Hispanics has created a need for innovative solutions. Currently the most common options companies use to access Hispanic professionals include career expos and executive search firms. Career expos provide a large number of targeted candidates in a brief period of time, but may require an entourage of interviewers. If the event occurs when job openings are available, this option can present a ‘quick fix’ solution.
However, for a more continuous flow of qualified candidates, some firms retain executive search firms who have access to an extensive network of potential candidates and active jobseekers. Some search firms focus specifically on attracting candidates directly from a client’s competitor.
Surprisingly these ‘true and tried’ options have not rendered favorable results with Hispanic candidates. Some of the problems highlighted include the following: First, career expos targeting Hispanic candidates are also attracting many more candidates from other ethnic groups; hence, rendering lower than expected qualified Hispanic candidates.
Moreover, many executive search firms, particularly the larger ones, are too impersonal to attract qualified Hispanic candidates. What then have some companies done to attract and retain Hispanic professionals?
A Fortune 100 firm in the financial services industry decided to take a different approach. Rather than focus their resources to attract Hispanic professionals, they chose to invest in their existing pool of employees by hiring an outside firm to teach their non-Hispanic employees basic cultural selling skills needed to close and maintain a transaction with Hispanic consumers.
In part they chose to ‘Hispanisize’ their non-Hispanic workforce. Other firms turn to smaller executive search firms that specialize in hiring Hispanic candidates. These specialty firms tap on their personal networks to gain access to a larger pool of potential Hispanic professional candidates.
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