Obtaining and maintaining a diverse workforce is a national security priority. Unfortunately, diversity in the government to-date has focused on quotas and training. While some may ask why diversity matters in the intelligence workforce, it’s key to remember that enemies of the United States do not discriminate. It’s to our advantage to come at national security from as many angles as possible. Solving perplexing national security problems benefits from the synergy of different perspectives.
A panel of high-level recruiting officials within the Intelligence Community sat down with the New York Times to offer their expertise. They offered several tips:
1. Mentoring
“If you have one intern or one student or employee who has a bad experience, you can lose a whole group of people,” noted Betsy Davis, chief of the recruitment support division at the CIA. “And we are trying very hard not to let that happen by focusing, especially with our summer students and interns and co-ops, on making sure our employees have a strong mentor in the organization who can share varied experiences and who can show new employees how to interact in what may be their first professional work environment.” Mentoring can go a long way to show young employees that they are valuable and teach them in a personal way where and how to grow.
2. Leadership Involvement
“Our Director clearly understands the value of diversity,” explains Michael O’Hara, director of diversity with the National Security Agency. “He’s a visionary leader, and he has made it possible to have a very powerful diversity statement. He is powerfully behind it in his personal time and presence in the business, and his commitment to it in terms of resources, so I have a very optimistic attitude about the business for the future.”
3. Redefining Diversity
All three agencies interviewed (FBI, CIA, and NSA) have challenged themselves to redefine diversity to include disabilities, age, ethnicity, and thought diversity.
“…it’s not only the traditional aspects of diversity that we’ve mentioned-race, diversity and background-but also language skill sets, experiences, overseas travel, military experience – all of those kinds of things that we need people to bring to the table so that we can accomplish the mission in front of us” says the CIA’s Davis
And NSA’s Michael O’Hara goes further in his diversity vision, saying, “In order to survive and stay ahead of our enemies, we need the diversity of thought that comes again from working totally across all business units and creating, to the maximum extent possible, creativity. Conversations that are controversial and provoke thought across differences can bring new creativity, and new ideas for us that we hope will go well beyond what other people are doing.”
The Three Themes of a Diverse Workforce Strategy
As a part of its Diversity Works series, The New York Times commissioned a survey of 500 nationwide job recruiters and 350 minority job seekers.
The following points really highlight the key themes presented in the survey findings: effort, retention, and image.
- Effort: At organizations that have diversity programs, 92 percent of hiring managers said senior management at the organization strongly supports diversity as a goal. Nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of the hiring managers in the survey said their organization’s diversity efforts are extremely or very successful. Achieving diversity in your workplace takes effort from everyone. Goals have to be set by top leadership and carried out by all those involved in hiring and retaining. It’s not just a human resources job. It’s an everyone job and it doesn’t happen on its own.
- Retention: Most job seekers (91 percent) said that diversity programs make an organization a better place to work. Employers who care about all of their workforce will create a great environment with competitive pay and benefits.
- Image: Nearly all minority candidates (97 percent) would rather work in a diverse workplace than not. 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.
If you want to appeal to the young and/or diverse, it takes effort from every level in the organization. Important and awkward conversations can bring about valuable change and sometimes an image overhaul. But real diversity efforts don’t just fill quotas. Instead, real diversity efforts make your organization a better place to work.
