Microsoft's diverse workforce

Think of someone who works for Microsoft, the company that successfully brought the personal computer into every aspect of modern life, and your mind will often conjure up a version of the company’s founder and visionary Bill Gates. Gates represents perhaps the archetypal IT geek, albeit one who has achieved far more than the average tech-head. As a result, the image of the IT industry as populated almost exclusively by white men has been very hard to shake off. Perhaps fittingly, it is Microsoft itself that is now out in front in the battle to bring a wider demographic mix to the technology business.

Kelly Chapman is the IT giant’s Director of Diversity Recruiting. When we speak to her from her Cleveland office, she acknowledges the size of the task she faced on taking up the position three years ago. “It is a challenge,” she says. “There is a lack of representation of women and minorities in technology. It makes it difficult when we go out to recruit because we are drawing from the same small talent pool that all of our competitors are recruiting from.”

Even places where you would expect to find a higher concentration of diverse, technologically minded candidates often provide slim pickings for companies like Microsoft. “We might go to a National Society of Black Engineers conference,” Chapman continues. “There are thousands of engineers there but how many are actually software developers or software engineers?” The answer: not many. While you might find a decent number of mechanical engineers, chemical engineers and electrical engineers, software specialists are frustratingly thin on the ground.

“The word hasn't gotten out about the exciting things that you can do with software and with technology,” Chapman says. “So one of the things that Microsoft is doing is trying to get the word out and make young people more aware, number one, about technology and number two, that there are actually people like them who are doing well in the technology field.”

Microsoft is lucky to have someone like Chapman leading this fight. Even a cursory glance at her personal biography marks her out as something quite different from the average corporate operator. That she is a single mother who has successfully raised a daughter now attending Ohio University, as well as the founder of a fund at the Cleveland Foundation to reward scholarships to individuals with mental-health challenges, is unusual enough. That she balances the demands of her day job with a singing career which has seen her release two albums, while also finding time to write a book about her life experiences, indicate we are dealing with someone pretty special.

Despite Chapman’s eminent suitability for a role supporting diversity, it was actually something she slipped into almost by accident. Starting out in sales, she transitioned into recruitment before striking out to set up Lightworld Enterprises LLC, her own search firm. “As my clients started to realize that I was diverse, they realized that they had a need for diversity,” she explains. “And so people started to ask me, if I could help them find diverse candidates. From there I started sourcing diverse candidates for a lot of the roles and I ended up transitioning my firm from just a standard search firm to a diversity focused search firm because I was getting so many requests.”

In 2006 Chapman was hired by Eaton Corporation, one of her clients, to set up its internal search practice. “I built their entire internal search practice. Because I had a passion for diversity and actually knew how to get that work done we had a very significant diversity fill rate at the Director level and above. I was always insuring that we were providing diverse candidates,” she continues.

Ultimately, Chapman’s work caught the eye of her current employers. “Somehow or other Microsoft found me and they recruited me away,” she recounts. “We were able to take some of the principles that I've used all of my career – executive search, research, sales and marketing, public speaking. All of those things have kind of helped to take the brand from where it was, which was already strong, but really deepen the relationships in diverse communities.”

Building momentum

Since Chapman’s arrival at Microsoft, the organization’s existing diversity efforts have moved into a higher gear. She describes the process as centered around three key pillars: “The first pillar is representation, and that's about increasing the diverse pipeline,” she explains. “Then inclusion is all about really supporting the cultivation of an inclusive workforce, ensuring that everyone's ideas are valued and included, and really just being a role model for inclusion. The last piece is market innovation, understanding that the marketplace is changing and we have to be prepared as a company to sell to and represent the global communities that we serve. By focusing on innovation and having diversity, we're able to build diverse products that meet the needs of very diverse customers that help us grow our business. Ultimately, it's going to spur creativity.”

In practice this means a great deal of work installing training classes and management excellence curriculums for hiring managers and so that people can both understand the business case for diversity, and how these principles can be instilled into teams throughout the organization. On the market innovation side, Chapman provides the example of Zune, Microsoft’s response to the all-conquering iPod, as one of the ways the organization’s product activities are influenced by the principle of diversity. “We had a diverse team of people who are going out to some of our diverse communities. It was critical that we ensured that their music was included as a part of that device,” she says. “It isn’t only representing one community but it's a device that all communities can enjoy.”

This concept illustrates the way that Chapman and Microsoft view diversity; not just through a social lens but also as a key factor in business competitiveness. “If we don't have multi-cultural perspectives and we're using a very unilateral or homogenous approach to how we build products, how we market products, we're not going to be able to reach the broadest audience,” she says. “We're a global company and we want to attract and sell to customers all over the world and that would include companies. We have to make sure that we have a very varied talent pool of employees who can bring different insight and perspective to everything that we do.”

Innovation and customer relationships are also seen as benefiting from greater diversity. By definition, a more diverse workforce will possess a wider range of experiences, skills and ideas, a situation which should lead to the more effective generation of new concepts. On the customer side, a global organization has to demonstrate that it is representing the varied communities it seeks to serve if it is to provide products and services that these communities are actually going to want.

Ultimately though, Chapman insists that Microsoft places such a priority on diversity largely because it is the right thing to do. “We wouldn’t be good corporate citizens if we didn’t focus on diversity and inclusion,” she says. “It's one of the principles that the senior leadership team has put in place that we value diversity and inclusion and not only from an employment standpoint but even the dollars that we give out to the community all over the world. Whether it's in Africa or in the United States, the money that we sow into communities and the programs that we have in place to help people realize their potential through technology is probably unsurpassed.”

Getting real

Of course it is very easy to talk up the importance of a diverse workforce. It is quite another thing to make this talk into a reality, particularly in an industry as traditionally monochrome as technology. For Chapman and her team, this means pursuing every opportunity to engage with potential minority candidates, even before they enter the job market. “We have a program called DigiGirlz and that's where we bring young girls in and they get an opportunity to meet women who are doing great things in technology,” Chapman explains. “We give them an opportunity to really understand what it's like to consider that as a field, to have a day in the life, and get them excited about wanting to pursue that course of study.”

In addition, Microsoft also supports schools that focus on science, technology, engineering and mathematics in minority populations, providing the technology and software that teachers need to create the tech professionals of tomorrow. “We  also give a lot of grants to organizations like the Urban League and a number of other organizations,  such as Thurgood Marshall scholarship funds, so that we can help to build the pipeline for the future,” continues Chapman.

But ensuring this supply of potential Microsoft employees will not be accomplished overnight, however much we might wish. “We know that it's going to take some time,” Chapman concedes, “but we are starting to realize – just like many other companies – that you've got to start early. We want to focus on who's available now, and that pool is limited, but we also know that we have to look long-term as well and think about who's going to be available in the next 10 to 15 years.”

To this end, Microsoft is engaged in a huge range of outreach programs designed to capture the imagination of a new generation of workers. These range from support to the Boys and Girls Club to staging regular technology days at traditionally diverse university campuses explaining the value of IT skills. While Microsoft is obviously looking for diverse candidates to fill roles throughout the company, from finance to marketing to HR, the starting point will always be an interest in the technology that underpins the whole organization. In fact, Chapman argues that these skills are going to be essential even if the potential candidates she deals with end up taking very different career paths.

“It is so critical that we spend time out in the field at these colleges and universities speaking to young people about preparing themselves,” she says. “Whether it's for Microsoft or whether it's for another company, technology is the wave of the future, it's not going away.  Everything is going to lean towards the technologies.  Therefore it is so important that we help prepare young people, college students, and our current workforce to be prepared for careers in technology.”

It is clear that Chapman and Microsoft are in this for the long haul. Both inside and outside the organization, the focus on diversity remains a key priority. Asked about future plans to continue the work done so far, Chapman has plenty to talk about. “We've just put together a wonderful suite of tools for our hiring managers, for our leaders, on how to embrace diversity inclusion principles,” she says. We've put together a list of behaviors that would be demonstrated by managers and leaders who are practicing good diversity and inclusion.”

There’s also a ‘micro inequalities’ course about subtle things that people might do that can make people feel excluded, which has recently been launched. Both of these educational pieces are part of a number of initiatives centered on preparing the entire corporate to embrace the different kinds of people who will continue to enter the workforce as the organization moves through the 21st century.

In the end, Chapman is adamant that the work she and her team are doing to make Microsoft a more diverse place to work will be worth it. “We'll start to see new products and new technologies coming out in the future and they will be developed by many different people from all over the world and they will reach people all over the world,” she says. “We're excited about these new directions and the other new ideas that will come in the future.”

The rules of attraction

Chapman explains why Microsoft is such a hit with the ladies

Within Microsoft we have one of our largest employee resource groups which is Women at Microsoft.  It's a huge organization internally and we have an annual conference. Sometimes it's outside of the United States where we'll have thousands of women who will come together and talk about the issues that are of importance to women in the workplace.

In some instances there are challenges in being a female in what is a male dominated culture. It's important to make sure that we are offering women support. One of the things that I believe has evolved from not only the external focus with the organizations but also having that internal focus is that we have probably one of the most female friendly cultures. For example, we've got flextime and we've got Mother's Rooms where you can have some privacy if you are a new mother.

We've got really good benefits for individuals who have children and maybe have special needs.  So we've done a lot as a company to provide a lot of support for women. Since I've been here I've talked to many women who were attracted to the company because of the benefits and it's one of the reasons that – among many – makes them to want to stay.

Shut up and DRIVE

How Chapman and her team keep diversity moving forward

One of the things we did a few years ago when I first joined the company is built a team that's totally focused on diversity recruiting and we call ourselves the DRIVE Team. That's an acronym that stands for Diversity Recruiting Initiatives Via Excellence.
And the unique thing about this team is we, number one, ensure that the capability of all of our recruiters for diversity recruiting is there.  So we help build the capability and we provide training and education and diversity tool kit.

We also do direct prospecting against open jobs within the organization.  So we're almost like an internal search firm in that when the organization has strategic positions that they'd like to focus on, in particular we try to focus on our more senior level positions, Director level and above. We try and just ensure that there's a diverse slate, and so we've been doing that now for three years.

We also support the marketing and outreach efforts, which includes attending events such as National Black MBA, Society of Women Engineers, National Society of Hispanic MBAs. We lead Microsoft’s presence at those events.

And we also build and implement branding campaigns.  And as a part of that campaign we launched an external diversity recruiting website that provides very honest and real dialogue about diversity at Microsoft. 

The name of the website is youatmicrosoft.com, And that website received a number of accolades, including the Webby Award for Best Employment Website in 2008.