A new Big Data report by CulturIntel and Hispanicize Media Group reveals that U.S. Latinos generally have a negative perception about applying for or working at most of the iconic brands of Silicon Valley.
The analysis of top 25 Silicon Valley companies* reveals that on average Hispanics report a work experience that is 1.5 times more negative versus the overall.
Also, positive sentiment for Latinos is almost half of that reported by the overall at 15.3 percent positive versus 28.8 for the overall. The ranking based on sentiment measurement only places some of the more established technology companies like Intuit, Samsung, and Dell in the lead each with above average positive sentiment at 25, 23 and 22 percent positive respectively.
However, these numbers are 1.5 times below the positive sentiment reported by the overall. The same companies at the top report 40, 40 and 27 percent respectively; therefore, confirming a gap in the work experience and the need for candidate-centered strategies for recruitment and retention.
The latest report demonstrates why there’s a large cultural gap for Latinos to become a part of the innovation that is disrupting scores of jobs in diverse communities.
It builds on the results of the first annual Hispanicize Silicon Valley Rankings (access them here) that earlier this month ranked AT&T, HP, Verizon, Dell and Facebook as the top 5 companies for Latino diversity and inclusion in tech.
“What we’re finding is that top Silicon Valley company overwhelmingly lack actionable, Latino-centered insights to decode the drivers and barriers faced by Hispanic employees and candidates in the tech sector,” said Claudia Romo Edelman, a rising national Latina leader who received the Rainbow PUSH Coalition Multicultural Leadership Award, spearheaded the CuturIntel/Hispanicize research.
“When a company’s workforce is diverse, it is more innovative, creative and impactful,” said Romo Edelman. “Fully empowering and integrating the segment driving most of the workforce growth and with more market potential, Latinos is critical for America to remain competitive in a global marketplace.”
To underscore the problem, Romo Edelman points to Pew Research Center, which estimates that while Latinos will represent 74 percent of the workforce growth from 2010 to 2020, they barely represent 4 percent of engineers and scientists and only 8 percent of all certificates and degrees awarded in the STEM fields, according to the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics. “For America to remain competitive we must empower young Latinos to embrace and love STEM,” said Romo Edelman.
The collaboration between HMG and CulturIntel, a company co-founded by cultural intelligence™ expert and former corporate executive, Liliana Gil Valletta, makes this initiative a pioneering effort to bring a new type of insight to better understand diversity challenges.
“We wanted to disrupt the way traditional insights are mined to empower the sector with actionable information coming straight from the voice of the people,” says Gil Valletta. “The open and unbiased digital discussions of candidates and employees across career sites, topical sites and forums present one of the richest sources of unbiased talent-centered intelligence. Beyond employee surveys or self-reported data, these external signals can provide us untapped insights that can help reshape inclusive recruitment and retention strategies that are candidate-centric.”
But what is behind positive or negative sentiment?
An overall analysis of drivers and barriers demonstrate how factors impacting the career experience and sentiment of Latinos are mostly influenced by environmental and relational factors such as diversity and culture inside the organization.
For example, an analysis of barriers or factors influencing negative sentiment, reveals a significant difference between segments. Diversity at the organization is six times more prominent as an expressed issue by Latinos versus the overall, as well as internal company culture. Factors such as work-life balance or career opportunity are less prominent for Hispanics. This indicates the importance to personalized engagement strategies that align to the prioritization of issues or barriers faced by this cohort.
Unlike most traditional industry rankings, which rely heavily on self-reported data, the analysis and ranking of top 25 Silicon Valley companies were informed by scraping and mining the unbiased career discussions of Latinos across blogs, career/ topical sites, message boards, review sites and social media destinations over the last 12 months. Social media only represented 11 percent out of a total universe of 198,597 relevant Hispanic data points analyzed. This novel research capability was provided by CulturIntel, a novel and Harvard validated research platform using a cocktail of big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence tools to mine, scrape, segment and make sense out of the digital discussions taking place anytime, anywhere online.
This ranking marks a pioneering effort that should be benchmarked as a novel method to bring diversity insights and cultural intelligence to the way companies seek to target and develop candidate-centered strategies for inclusion.
Download infographic here.
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