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According to the Wall Street Journal, Intel is doubling referral bonuses for women, minorities and veterans. Employees can receive $4,000 bonuses for suggesting candidates that meet the company's diversity goals. Intel had previously pledged $300 million over the next five years to address "Silicon Valley's disappointing diversity numbers," and has set a goal of "full representation" of women and under-represented minorities by 2020:
The new programs at Intel and across the tech sector come as companies report little-changed diversity numbers. Intel's diversity statistics for 2014 showed 24 percent of Intel employees are female. The company is also predominantly white and Asian, with only 3.5% black and 8% Latino employees. The company did not include statistics about veterans in its report.
Christine Dotts, a spokeswoman for Intel, said in an email that higher recruiting bonuses have been used by the company in the last decade, but she declined to comment on when or how much the bonuses were for.
Also at The Register.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2015, @03:30AM
Hiring managers and recruiters have no idea how to place veterans, so they get left out of jobs that they qualify for. There was a time, not long ago, when the veteran unemployment rate was over 30%.
Not everybody who goes into the military goes to war, and not everybody who goes to war is infantry. There are mid twenty veterans with the type of management skills that corporate spends thousands of dollars and hundreds of man hours per person to develop in house. There are technical skills that veterans have right now ... US military is probably the biggest entity using FreeBSD+ZFS, for example, that would draw a blank stare from a recruiter looking for someone with "NetApp" experience. And then there's the intimidation factor by young managers unwilling to hire someone with potentially more management and technical experience.
I won't speak about the affirmative action by race thing. But there are cultural differences in the military and private sectors that can be remedied by changing hiring preferences, to the benefit of both entities.