Lessons on hiring, mobile and audience-building among take-aways at ASNE Leadership Diversity session

• By: ASNE staff
• On: 09/28/2011 14:00:00
• In: Leadership in diversity sessions

NEW YORK -- Finding good, diverse talent on the business side is just the beginning. Convincing them to join your organization is the real challenge.

Growth in mobile is going to be huge and companies need to plan an aggressive strategy.

The ability to collaborate and innovate are essential for today's executives.

Those are just three key take-away messages from the second day of the “Leadership in Diversity: New Models for Growing Audience, Talent & Revenue” held last week at The New York Times Conference Center.

In all, nearly 80 news leaders and executives and diversity advocates attended the two-day session which focused on revenue potential for reaching markets of different types. The sessions were planned and coordinated by a broad cross section of news industry representatives and news-related institutes with financial support from the ASNE, Ford, Gannett and McCormick foundations, the Philip L. Graham Fund and The Times.

Finding diverse talent on the business side

Think of it more as a buyer's market, and a digital one at that. Be strategic, and be prepared to sell yourself if you expect to succeed.

That's the gospel on finding diverse talent on the business side in an age where social networking is creating a movable feast of job fairs in cyberspace, the nation is becoming more diverse and the competition is pretty intense.

Finding the people you want might be the easier part. Harder is reeling them in. The potential employer accustomed to looking at resumes, scrutinizing content samples and gazing at references might do well to imagine that the face on the other side of the table is a kind of mirror.

“Those you want to hire are checking you out,” says Virgil Smith, Gannett Co., Inc.'s vice president for talent acquisition and diversity. He recommended checking out the recruiter package on the Linked In website.

Your own website will be important, as well. It may fare better in the check-it-out test if it is transparent, engaging and fresh--like, believe it or not, sunriseseniorliving.com, according to Rosemary Haefner, vice president, human resources at careerbuilder.com. A would-be employer can win points by coming across as the place that thrives on mobile and internet, allows employees to work from anywhere, has flexibility and offers multipurpose opportunities and a way that its employees can be a part of the action more immediately.

The stars of this show were two 24-year-olders--Daniel Trach, a digital sales account executive with the Enquirer Media Group in Cincinnati, and Amber Guyton, a multimedia specialist with WXIA-TV/WATL-TV in Atlanta. Both are alumni of the program that Smith runs, that tries to identify talent early, nurture it and assure a longer-term future with Gannett.

“Nobody is too small to be taken seriously in your organization,” is the message that Trach urged employers to send to potential employees. “We're hungry for a challenge, and always hungry for more,” is the message Guyton said the employees would send back.

Theirs is a new-school generation likely to evaluate potential workplaces on a host of key factors. Among them:

Is there a clear future in the company? Is promotion realistic? What can I contribute?

Can I do things above and beyond my level?

Are you empowering me? Do you care about my opinion? Will a mentor take me under a wing? Can I think big? Will you recognize and respect that I am of a new generation?

It's all about the Benjamins--and the benefits, too. I'll work hard for the money, but also for success. Like, being able to travel? That could be huge.

Keith Reed, the 34-year old treasurer for the National Association of Black Journalists who also is a senior editor at ESPN, cut to the chase on the issue of retention. “You have to show somebody from the day you bring them in the door that there is opportunity for investment,” Reed said. “Your time frame is six months--tops.”

The panel's moderator, Karen Magnuson, vice president and editor of the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle and co-chair of the diversity committee of the American Society of News Editors, punctuated the message. In mid-career, she has enrolled in a graduate school program surrounded by relative youngsters and become a regular on Twitter.

“If you're going to keep up with young people you have to participate in what they do,” Magnuson said. “Learn the social networks they live in. We have as much responsibility to learn about technology as the young people we hire.”