July 20, 2006
New staff recruiter to concentrate on diversity in hiring, retention
When the word diversity is mentioned at the UW, most people would be likely to think first of faculty and students, but this year the University has turned its attention to diversity among staff. Human Resources has hired a diversity specialist to concentrate on staff recruitment and retention.
Her name is Chesca Ward, and she arrived at the UW on June 26, after similar positions at Accenture and Microsoft.
“We decided to hire a staff diversity specialist in response to the Leadership, Community and Values survey,” said Joanne Suffis, interim vice president for human resources. “The survey results showed that staff of color view the University less positively than staff in general.”
On the survey, when asked to rate the University’s climate for people of color, 51 percent of staff of color rated it favorable, compared to 56 percent for staff in general. The numbers for African American staff were particularly low, with 29 percent saying the climate was favorable, 45 percent calling it somewhat favorable and 26 percent unfavorable.
“In other places I’ve worked, it was not uncommon to have a diversity staffing position,” Suffis said. “I noticed that this was missing when I first got here, and when the survey results came back, I knew we had to do something.”
Suffis said Ward’s job will be to create a diversity strategy, saying, “We haven’t had a strategy up to now. We just advertise and people apply.”
Ward said she’ll create that strategy using what she calls building blocks. “I begin by finding out what programs we already have and asking if we can leverage any of those to do more,” she said. “Sometimes the resources exist and people just don’t know about them, so it’s making them more aware.”
Right now she’s spending a great deal of time meeting people within the University, working on building relationships and making sure she understands how people relate to each other within the institution. “Then I’ll be developing relationships externally in the Seattle community, especially with diversity organizations,” she said. “I’m also analyzing what’s been done in the past here — what’s worked and what hasn’t and why.”
But she adds that she won’t be plucking strategies from previous jobs wholesale and dropping them into the University system.
“In diversity initiatives you have to be careful that whatever you’re doing is embraced and included in the current culture,” Ward said. “So as I talk to people I’m trying to see what types of things would fit in with the culture here.”
Ward is somewhat familiar with the University, even though she didn’t go to school here. She grew up in Auburn and headed off to the University of Pennsylvania for her undergraduate education, intending to come back to Seattle and attend the UW Medical School.
But after earning a biology degree with a minor in African American studies, Ward had a change of heart. It seemed to her that medicine was moving in a more regimented direction, and she worried about whether it was a field she would want to stay in. So instead of applying for medical school, she got a job managing one of the espresso bars at Nordstrom while she tried to figure out what to do.
“When I looked at the things I really enjoyed, diversity was one of those things,” Ward said. “I liked running workshops, giving talks on the subject and so on. When I asked myself how I could turn that into a job, I realized that it all fell under the human resources umbrella. So I decided I would get an entry level position in HR.”
Ward managed to do that at Microsoft, where at first she was a recruiter. But she volunteered when she could for assignments such as recruiting at the National Society of Black Engineers convention, so when Microsoft created two positions in diversity, she was hired for one of them. She stayed at Microsoft for eight years before moving on to Accenture, a consulting technology outsourcing company, as part of their diversity recruiting team.
At the UW, Ward sees her role in recruiting to be largely one of making sure the minority community is aware of University job opportunities and making sure UW employment specialists are aware of qualified candidates of color. She’s already joined the Seattle Diversity Recruiters Network to help her with community contacts.
Retention is also part of Ward’s job description, and she’s getting started on that piece by contacting UW organizations such as the Black Faculty and Staff Association to see what they’re doing. “These groups will have a stronger pulse on what people in the various groups are saying,” she said.
And though she’ll be making a long-term plan — perhaps for three years, perhaps for five — Ward said she sees diversity as an ongoing effort that is never really finished, and one that she finds personally rewarding. She added, “It’s exciting for me to be able to have an impact on the city in which I grew up.”
