8 Dos and Don’ts of Messaging Underrepresented Students

clipboard with checklist Take the time to tailor your outreach to students from underrepresented backgrounds.

Diversity and inclusion has been a popular topic in recruiting for a while now, and for good reason. Diverse and inclusive workplaces are typically characterized by innovation, positive employee morale, and an improved bottom line. Diverse teams add significant value to any organization, but creating a representative workforce is a consistent challenge for many employers. To be more effective at engaging students from underrepresented backgrounds, let’s first explore who these unique candidates are.

Who is a diverse candidate?

While those included in underrepresented minorities (URMs) and underrepresented groups (URGs) have come to include more and more people, the definition generally remains the same. An underrepresented minority is someone who is disproportionately less represented in a specific industry or field—like science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)— compared to the general population. URMs typically include people from minority race and ethnic backgrounds, like Black or Latinx, and sexual orientation and gender, like LGBTQ+ or women in STEM.

Because URMs are uniquely diverse people, employers need to communicate to them in a way that celebrates their uniqueness and their backgrounds while highlighting the value your organization places on inclusivity. Not sure where to start? We’ll show you how to reach out to underrepresented minorities (and what not to do) to build a more talented and representative team.

How do I message students from underrepresented backgrounds?

You have internship opportunities and jobs to fill and you’d like to build a more representative organization, so you’ve decided to engage with candidates from varying backgrounds and experiences, including URMs. But where do you start?

Instead of sending the same canned message to every student, take the time to personalize your outreach—your recipients will appreciate it. Handshake’s Campus to Career report revealed that 95% of students surveyed prefer to engage with employers that send personalized, proactive messages. This is your chance to show candidates that you value them enough as individuals to not send them the same standard message everyone else gets.

Here are a few best practices to follow when messaging diverse talent.

1. Don’t make assumptions

Students from URGs aren’t all the same. Nearly half of Latinx students are the first in their families to go to college, but that doesn’t mean that every Latinx student is a first-generation college student. Identifying with a certain underrepresented group doesn’t take away a student’s individuality. Treat students as individuals by avoiding generalizations or stereotyping them.

2. Avoid tokenizing candidates

It’s easy to get caught up in diversity recruitment, but students from underrepresented backgrounds prefer to be hired for their skills and expertise, not their ethnic or racial status. Your messages need to reflect that. When you tell a URM student that you’re messaging them because they’re a minority, you risk offending or tokenizing them.

Tip: Avoid phrases like, “Looking for black students for our STEM internship” or “Latinx women are invited to apply.” Many Handshake employers go with a standard subject line like, “You received a message from [employer] on Handshake,” which typically gets a 65% average open rate.

3. Consider your candidates

Before you reach out to students, you should first consider who they are, where they come from, and their motivations. For example, some employers still set GPA cutoffs to source qualified candidates when it’s been proven to be an inaccurate indicator of job performance. It might not seem like a big deal until you consider that 60% of Black student applications and 56 percent of Latinx student applications have a GPA below 3.5. Keep in mind that these students may have had unequal access to resources, skilled teachers, or may be working multiple jobs to support their families. Any of these could impact their GPA.

Tip: Nix the GPA requirements. When Handshake Premium partner Whirlpool Corporation did this, their percentage of URM hires increased from 30 to 40 percent YOY.

URM students are more likely to work part-time throughout school and therefore don’t have the time to perfect their applications or track down the supplemental documents (e.g., transcripts, recommendation letters) needed to apply. Some are so busy that they can’t meet strict recruiting deadlines. Encourage applications by recruiting year-round and giving busy candidates time to put together a quality application instead of rushing to just send something in.

4. Be proactive and be relevant

We all want to be wanted, and students are no different. Instead of waiting until you meet a student at a career fair or see that someone attended your virtual event, send messages proactively. The key is to engage with students who you’re interested in, but that will also find your messages relevant. Sending a woman interested in marketing a message about your STEM internship will likely get ignored because it’s not relevant to her.

Tip: Check out students’ profiles before messaging them. Nothing’s worse than sending an irrelevant message to a candidate who tells other students about you spamming them (even if you didn’t intend to spam them).

5. Review students’ profiles before messaging them

Students work hard to create their online brand—a digital representation of who they are. Handshake student profiles give valuable insights into a candidate, such as what kind of work they’re looking for, which locations they want to work in, the specific roles they’re interested in, any organizations they’re part of, and more. Take this opportunity to get to know the candidate and leverage what’s on their profile to personalize your outreach.

6. Be authentic

You expect candidates to be upfront and transparent with you, so candidates should expect the same from you. Students can quickly determine whether your message is an impersonal message that hundreds of other students received or if you put some thought into crafting your message. Connect with each student through personalized outreach and show them they can trust you.

Read the full article on the Handshake Employer blog here.

By Tyson Tate
Tyson Tate