Dwayne Ashley, president and CEO of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund (TMCF), is an unruffled perfectionist who is never satisfied with the status quo. When a challenge presents itself, Ashley eagerly seeks out a solution. His motto: find a way or make one.
When Ashley discovered that corporate America was not recruiting students at historically Black college and universities as aggressively as students enrolled in traditionally White institutions, instinctively, he sought a solution. Determined to pipeline public HBCU students from classrooms to boardrooms, he launched the Thurgood Marshall HBCU Talent Sourcing Program in January.
“From our most recent study, we know that Fortune 400 companies and government agencies, for budgetary reasons, are not recruiting students from HBCUs as aggressively as they should. We are bringing the best and the brightest students from our 47 institutions to them. When they have expended their budgets, they can access 235,000 men and women seeking opportunity through our database,” he says.
While there are other organizations that provide companies with minority résumé databases, TMCF is the only organization that hand-selects and pre-screens the students in their sourcing databases prior to making them available to hiring firms. Only candidates whose skills keenly match a company’s requirements are then recommended.
“We are not just a database service. We actually go to the campuses and recruit. That makes all the difference. We are meeting students where they are and conducting face-to-face interviews. There is no other program like this in the country,” Ashley says.
