Workforce diversity boosted by recommending a friend

Referring friends and associates for job vacancies can help to create a diverse workforce, a new study from the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University finds.

Word-of-mouth recruitment, the most common way to fill jobs, has previously been thought to cause segregation at work: women tend to reach out to other women in their networks, and men do likewise.

However, Professor Brian Rubineau has found a way to use word-of-mouth recruiting to integrate rather than segregate. Groups who recruit more actively tend to increase their numbers in their companies, even groups starting out in the minority. This finding can help various minority groups within companies, including those based on ethnicity.

Read full article: HR News, 2 February, 2016