2019 Corporate Responsibility Report

Diverse Talent Acquisition

Discover considers all applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, national origin, marital status, status as a disabled individual, protected veteran, or based on any individual’s status in any group or class protected by applicable federal, state, or local law.

Our strategy to promote diverse talent acquisition includes “HireSmart” training that helps managers effectively engage in the recruitment process and to use structured tools to achieve better outcomes. The training covers adherence to legal guidelines and guidance on how to recognize and minimize interview bias.

We face two main recruitment challenges by our need to constantly diversify our workforce. These challenges include streamlining the recruitment process, including the number of steps in the application, and creating additional points of contact with candidates to drive their awareness and consideration of our roles.

One of the key strategies we use to promote our open positions is to attend conferences and events for diverse candidates. In 2018-19, we participated in:

  • Disability:IN
  • National Black MBA Association® (NBMBAA)
  • Out & Equal
  • Reaching Out MBA (ROMBA) Conference
  • Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE)
  • Society of Women Engineers (SWE)

External Partnerships

We fully recognize our responsibility to advance diversity and inclusion (D&I) both inside and outside Discover and recognize that we can’t do it alone. We partner with organizations that promote, help, and improve D&I at Discover by offering professional development opportunities and by sharing our open roles with their members.

AnitaB.org
National partner and Diamond-level sponsor of 2019 Grace Hopper Celebration.

Chicago Financial Services Pipeline Initiative
Identified high-potential diverse employees to participate in the Corporate Inclusion Institute (CII).

Leading Women Executives Program
Female employees participated in the 2019 program.

Military Spouse Employment Partnership
Employees in 12 states utilized the Work@Home program.

United Negro College Fund
UNCF scholars interned with Discover.

Spotlight: Discover Law Department’s D&I Leadership

The legal profession in the U.S. is among the least diverse in the country.1 In 2017, the American Bar Association’s National Lawyer Population Survey reported only 5 percent of active attorneys identified as Black, African American, Hispanic, or Latino, while only 20 percent of partners in a law firm were women.

At Discover, we’re proud to have a legal organization that is making a concerted effort to increase minority representation within our ranks, as well as in the profession generally.

Unconscious Bias Training

In 2018-19, our legal organization’s D&I Committee hosted two training sessions to help the team understand their unconscious biases. The training targeted gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and physical and mental disabilities. Participants were amazed to learn about biases they did not realize they harbored, and some even described it as “life-changing.” Many immediately started to dismantle buried stereotypes. Other Discover departments have conducted similar unconscious bias training for employees.

Ensuring a Diverse Candidate and Interviewer Panel

Like the rest of the company, recruiting diverse candidates is one of our legal organization’s top priorities, and the team’s D&I Committee has developed a three-point recruiting strategy to achieve success:

  1. Compiling a list of diverse bar associations and legal organizations to broaden the pool of diverse candidates.
  2. Requiring interview panels and candidate slates to be diverse.
  3. Developing diversity interview questions to evaluate job applicants’ experience and commitment to D&I.

Legal Organization Supplier Diversity Scorecard

Our legal organization is in a unique position to hold law firms accountable for improving D&I, so the team created a scorecard to assess firms’ D&I programs, including the hiring, promotion, and retention of diverse attorneys. The scorecard data is designed to be used as part of the legal organization’s process for selecting outside counsel and to guide staffing on Discover matters. The D&I Committee tracks law firms’ progress and works with them to improve their programs.

Mentoring Diverse Attorneys

The legal organization has a goal to support the retention and advancement of diverse talent in law firms with which it works. To support this goal, we launched a department-wide Diversity Mentoring Program in 2020, following a pilot program in 2019. The D&I Committee works with several of its third-party firms to identify 16 diverse attorneys who are mentored by a Discover attorney over six months. The program focuses on helping the mentees develop key skills, such as relationship building and leadership.

  1. Allison E. Laffey and Allison Ng, “Diversity and Inclusion in the Law: Challenges and Initiatives,” American Bar Association, 2018.