DELOITTE & TOUCHE USA LLP

People make the brand—and the difference

By Paula Fagerberg

Deloitte & Touche USA LLP, one of the nation's leading professional services firms, provides audit, tax, consulting and financial advisory services through its subsidiaries: Deloitte & Touche LP, Deloitte Consulting LLP, Deloitte Financial Services LLP, and Deliotte Tax LLP. It provides these services to more to more than half of the world's largest companies through 35,000 people in more than 80 U.S. cities.

WORKFORCE: The more diverse our people's backgrounds, the better. With more than 100,000 professionals worldwide sharing their unique perspectives across our business functions, we are well positioned in the marketplace to understand our clients' complex needs.

DIVERSITY PROGRAMS: Breakthrough Leadership Program: A leadership development program for top–rated minority managers and senior managers. Think Tank: A team that advises our National Managing Partner on critical business issues. Business Resource Groups: Six affinity networks that develop and execute programs to support our diversity and inclusion goals.

WEBSITE & RECRUITING CONTACT: www.deloitte.com/us. Kaplan Mobray, U.S. Diversity Recruiting Leader, kmobray@deloitte.com.

What was influential to your choice to join Deloitte?
It was the people I met—a leadership group that had a firm commitment to people, diversity, and inclusion. I always understood that our brand and difference was going to be our people, and since our ability to attract and retain the best is so important, we must have a leadership team in place who supports an inclusive work environment – which we definitely do.

Tell us a bit about diversity and Deloitte.
We believe we get better decisions from having a diverse population. Our clients are diverse and multinational, and we need to bring those perspectives to the table when we're solving problems for our clients. You also can't lose sight of historically underrepresented groups, but at the same time you need to move the conversation to one of inclusion that makes everyone feel comfortable that they can work together. The first thing you notice when you come to Deloitte is that people who have similar backgrounds or experiences are in senior positions, which is key.

We offer some online diversity awareness and efficacy training courses that you do during the first few months here. Our Employee Networks - or Business Resource Groups make up more than 80 chapters across the U.S., are open to all employees and are represented by ethnicity, sexual orientation and parenting groups. They contribute to our success through activities that support our recruiting, professional development and community visibility.  We're noted as one  of the best places to launch a career — we're number three, according to Business-Week; Fortune.com also recently did a study which ranked us as one of the top five internship programs in the country. We're especially noted in the marketplace for our women's initiative program, or WIN, that we started many years ago, which is our commitment to saying that our leaders should be representative of the population at large. We lead the Big Four in percentage of women partners, principals and directors.

Other diversity initiatives for students include the Jackie Robinson Foundation that provides minority students with college scholarships. We're also the number-two hirer of INROADS in the country. Just our presence in the community is what really gets the word out.

Simply put, we view diversity as a strategic imperative for our organization. We believe that the best way to attract, develop, and retain the best and brightest is to create a culture that widely recognizes and encourages professional and personal development by inviting different perspectives and valuing each individual's unique contribution.