When two Chicago-based minority job sites partnered with Monster.com in March 2008, the company that owns them was large enough that it could have had its pick of partners.
Professional Diversity Network, which runs iHispano.com for Hispanics and AMightyRiver.com for blacks, was in a position to decline financial partnership offers from venture capitalists seeking to align with the growing company.
"We've never sought outside capital; we've turned down outside overtures," said Jim Kirsch, founding partner of Professional Diversity Network. Kirsch joined the company in 2005, six years after his partner, Rudy Martinez, launched iHispano.
Since 2005, traffic to the site has grown dramatically: from 10,000 visitors a month to about 1 million visitors a month in 2009, mostly through word-of-mouth marketing and partnerships with churches and community and professional organizations in the Hispanic community.
Today, between 3,000 and 5,000 people join
iHispano and A Mighty River each day. And Kirsch and Martinez have plans to create sites aimed at the LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or questioning) community, Asian-Americans and veterans.
The Web sites' success points to a larger trend. The nation's minority populations are on the rise. According to recently released census data, minorities make up nearly 35 percent of the U.S. population. But they are also disproportionately unemployed, according to a study released in June by the Economic Policy Institute.
The study looked at the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the country and found that in all but two, the white unemployment rate was lower than the overall rate. In 2009, the national unemployment rate among Hispanics averaged 11.8 percent overall in those cities versus 7.8 percent for whites. For blacks, the average unemployment rate hovered above 14 percent, nearly twice that of whites.
Chicago ranked seventh among cities for unemployment disparity between whites and blacks and ninth in disparity between whites and Hispanics.
Despite these numbers, minorities are considered "hard-to-reach" in the Web-based job recruitment space.
"It's less hard-to-reach as it is hard-to-identify," said Steve Pemberton, chief diversity officer for Monster. "Regrettably, the perception is that one's race, gender or sexual orientation might lead to discrimination."
Monster found that in some cases, job candidates were leaving their last names off a resume because they feared it would identify them as Hispanic, even while the companies continued to tell Monster they were looking for ways to recruit minorities.
"They are finding more and more of their consumers are Latino; so their drivers now have been rooted in the fact they need to find products and services that reflect that marketplace," Pemberton said.
After enduring several rounds of layoffs, Dora Garcia Karp found a job through iHispano with the Wall Street Journal as a print sales coordinator.
She first tried the local Spanish Coalition office for help in finding a job but discovered that they didn't have the resources she needed.
She found iHispano online and said she was immediately impressed when she saw listings from Fortune 500 companies and tools that allowed her to network with other job seekers and employers interested in diversifying.
Knowing that those employers specifically chose to list positions on a site that describes itself as a portal for "corporate recruitment of bilingual professional talent in the Hispanic community" made her confident that her background could be an asset rather than a means for discrimination, she said.
"Companies are reaching out to
iHispano because they know that's their audience," she said.
Deena Pierott, who sits on the board of the Washington State Commission on African American Affairs said corporations need to navigate minority networks to be able to recruit more minorities.
"In communities of color, that sense of community is key," she said. "If you are genuinely interested in building an inclusive work force, you really have to be on sites like A Mighty River."
The son of an Indiana steel-mill worker and a mom who held down two jobs to send him to a private school, Rudy Martinez launched iHispano.com in 1999 following a career in pharmaceutical and health care consulting where he was the only Hispanic among 20 division presidents.
As an imbedded member of the Hispanic community, Martinez persuaded professional organizations to post openings to what originally began as a small job board and quickly turned into the leading online career resource for Hispanics in the country.
Kirsch, a councilman in Highland Park since 2001, joined the venture in 2005 and helped turn iHispano into a Web giant.
The site powers the career centers and official networking sites for 12 of the leading Hispanic professional organizations, including the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, Hispanic Alliance for Career Enhancement and ALPFA, a professional organization for Latinos in business, finance, accounting and related professions.
In the case of A Mighty River, Professional Diversity Network sent employees to New Orleans between January and April 2008 to make and increase contacts within the African-American community.
Terrence Rice, managing director of New Orleans-based Diversity Business Solutions, brought the employees to jazz clubs, where he says the real networking happens "offline." He said he did his best to show them the African-American experience in New Orleans during two trips, both of which lasted four days.
"Once you penetrate a certain level in life and you get involved in the business community, everybody has the same habits and does the same things. … At the end of the day, birds of a feather flock together," he said.
The power of A Mighty River, he said, is that it leverages these kinds of pre-existing networks, rather than attempting to replace them, then globalizes it.
"If I moved to Atlanta and know absolutely no one, I could go on A Mighty River, find one of my fraternity brothers and find information about X, Y, Z — we have that commonality," he said.
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