Opening offices in new counties may be an untapped strategy businesses can adopt to create more racially diverse workforces, The Wall Street Journal reported Feb. 21.
WSJ cited a new report from the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. Researchers studied employment data from more than 3,000 U.S. counties and cross-referenced it with corporate data. They found that geography could be key in closing racial gaps.
Cities like Seattle or Austin that are expected to see the most job growth over the next decade have small Black populations, the report found. In addition, nearly 60 percent of Black Americans in the private workforce live in the South where many counties have low job growth, according to federal data.
"Workers need to be connected to the opportunities being created and have the skills for the in-demand roles," James Manyika, a senior partner at McKinsey who helped lead the research, said in an interview with WSJ. "But jobs are often concentrated in counties that aren't necessarily accessible to Black workers."
Mr. Manyika said that businesses are missing out on strong pipelines of talent by skipping over low-growth counties.
"Often, some of those counties are very close to large cities," he said. "So it could easily be putting up an office in those counties next to a very large city and having access to talent that's there, but somehow companies haven't quite recognized that."
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