One tip: Get employees to help recruit from their alma mater.
By Holly Johnson Amaya
To retain diverse talent, commercial real estate companies must “really intentionally create” professional development initiatives that identify and showcase midlevel strong performers to senior leadership, according to Nadine Augusta, chief diversity equity and inclusion officer at Cushman & Wakefield.
“What I find is often it’s not just the development, it’s more visibility and connections and relationships with senior leadership and the ability to showcase skills,” Augusta said Tuesday at a panel moderated by Megan Abraham, CEO of The Goldie Initiative, at this year’s GlobeSt ELITE Women of Influence event. “Often it’s not that they need a ton of development. It may be that you have strong talented women in the organization who are getting mentored, but they don’t have the ability to showcase those skills to decision makers. So you want to think about being intentional about creating opportunities for that to happen.”
Augusta’s fellow panelist Allison Weiss, principal and founder of CRE Recruiting, agreed, noting that such focus “builds stickiness” with program participants.
“It really shows people the experience that you’re trying to create,” Weiss said. “And then those people go out and tell their family and friends and evangelize about what your company is doing.”
When it comes to recruiting diverse talent at the postgraduate level, Weiss recommends going directly to the heads of on campus affinity groups and seeking opportunities to regularly meet with students through speaking and other engagements.
“I frequently tell small and midsized companies that may not have a budget to, say, participate in an on-campus recruiting program to build strong relationships with the heads of diverse student business organizations and clubs,” she said. “Just got directly to club leadership and say you’d like to engage with them. There are people I’m placing today that I spoke to their undergrad class. That’s really rewarding, and people remember that…you can’t put a dollar value on someone seeing you consistently.”
Augusta also recommends that DEI pros leverage people inside their organizations to help recruit from their alma mater.
“So much talent is out there,” Augusta says, adding that recruiting diverse candidates shouldn’t be limited to those already working within CRE.
“There are so many adjacent fields – a great candidate does not necessarily have to be someone from another commercial real estate company,” she said. “We have to think more creatively about the skills and capabilities a particular role requires, versus the exact experience that role represents.”
Check back soon for more insights from panelists at this year’s GlobeSt ELITE Women of Influence conference in Lake Tahoe, Calif.