The Secret Sauce: Explore Key Ingredients to Well-Balanced DEI Best Practices with your Diversity Chef

Diversity sourcing gets treated like meal preparation: gather the right ingredients, know what's missing, avoid substitutes, and serve something that actually reflects the full range of demographic groups rather than the same two or three categories most companies default to. Before any outreach happens, an internal audit matters most: look at every layer of the organization, not just leadership, to see where diversity of thought and demographic representation are both lacking. Teams built from repeated hires out of the same handful of companies tend to reproduce the same perspectives, no matter how diverse the individual hires appear.

Sourcing itself gets built around targeted strategies rather than trying to hire "everything at once." Setting one or two realistic goals, tied to actual talent availability in a given market, works better than chasing unrealistic representation percentages that don't match the labor pool.

A number of concrete tactics get laid out for finding underrepresented candidates:

• Searching for associations, societies and organizations tied to specific communities (a simple Boolean string combining a demographic term with "association," "society" or "organization" surfaces groups like tribal or First Nations development networks).
• Building first-person narrative strings that mimic how people describe themselves online ("I am a software engineer and tribe member"), which surfaces personal blogs and websites, not just LinkedIn profiles, often with direct contact information.
• X-ray searching specific sites and using the "around" operator to find phrases sitting near each other in the same sentence, capturing identity language people use to describe themselves.
• Scanning candidate content for symbols, emojis and cultural references, then feeding those into search strings to surface adjacent communities.
• Building profile searches around shared interests, including food, hobbies or cultural touchpoints, as a way to start authentic, non-generic outreach instead of generic recruiter messaging.
• Using regional and national university diversity indexes to identify schools outside the usual list of well-known institutions, since diverse talent pools exist well beyond the most recognized programs.

The common thread across every tactic is specificity and authenticity: generic recruiter messages get ignored, while outreach referencing something real about a candidate's background, interests or community gets a response. None of these techniques guarantee a candidate's identity, and the point isn't to assume or stereotype, but to open a genuine conversation with communities that traditional sourcing methods routinely miss.