In an effort to expand their appeal to a wider applicant pool, many firms have targeted the undergraduate lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered community with special events during on-campus recruiting.
A group of about 20 undergraduate students attended a cocktail reception Monday evening at La Terrasse organized by Bain Gay and Lesbian Alliance for Diversity -- part of the international consulting firm Bain & Company. The reception was held to introduce students to the dynamics of being gay at Bain and in the business world in general.
In some ways, this is nothing new; firms like Bain have been doing LGBT recruitment on the MBA level for a number of years.
"Organizations like consulting firms are anxious to select the best people from the largest pool they can amass," Director of Career Services Patricia Rose said. "And so they want to make sure that everyone feels that they will be able to do well at the organization, and, as a consequence, organizations have for years done special outreach for different groups."
She explained that, in the past, such groups have included the black community, the Latino community and now the LGBT community.
This trend is especially evident among the consulting firms, such as Bain, McKinsey & Company and Monitor Group, all of whom held LGBT-related events in addition to their regular on-campus recruiting this year.
The trend began with firms "realizing that they could draw very highly qualified employees by having policies and practices that were gay-positive and by reaching out to the LGBT community to enlarge their pool of applicants," Director of the LGBT Center Robert Schoenberg said.
And although consulting firms are in some regard the most visible demonstrations of this development, it is spreading to other industries as well. Firms in consulting and the investment banking industries sponsored and participated in the first annual Out for Undergraduate Business Conference, held at Cornell University this past weekend.
The representatives at the conference "talked about the general program and what each company offered, but each program also had an LGBT element to it," said Wharton senior Luzern McAllister, who was among the 11 Penn students in attendance out of around 100 attendees. "Presenters were part of the LGBT community -- they talked from their personal perspective, which was very helpful."
Among the MBA ranks, this phenomenon has been longstanding. According to Chris Higgins, associate director of MBA career management, companies have had efforts to illustrate their LGBT awareness for more than a decade.
The Reaching Out MBA conference -- an annual conference targeting LGBT MBA students -- has had a large assortment of companies, including investment banking, consulting, media and entertainment, automotive and technology companies.
And if Bain is any indication, this trend is going to expand further. "We started undergrad LGBT recruiting efforts last year. Penn was the very first school that we had an event at," New York-based Bain consultant Angela Crossman said. "So this year we have actually increased it considerably," including events in New York, San Francisco and Boston.
The response to such events has been for the most part positive, Schoenberg said. The success is "partly measured by the number of people attending, but also it's a very uplifting experience to see that somebody is interested in recruiting you, knowing that you are gay or lesbian." Schoenberg added that this is a remarkable improvement compared to the hostile situations LGBT students often faced 15 years ago during job searches.
"What I am impressed with most is the type of questions they answer that I didn't even know how to ask, whether it be about domestic partner benefits or what the culture is like," said Wharton senior Zachary Drossman, who was in attendance at the Bain event.
This trend has received criticism, as some question the legitimacy of recruiting people in accordance to sexual orientation. In response to a criticism received via e-mail, Schoenberg said, "The individual complaining may have misunderstood an attempt to broaden the pool of applicants as an intention to hire people because they are lesbian or gay."
