Hidden Talent: How to Employ Refugees, the Formerly Incarcerated & People With Disabilities

Are you tired of looking for productive, loyal employees in an era of chronic talent shortages? Do you want to know how innovative businesses successfully recruit and retain refugees with limited English, the formerly incarcerated, and people with disabilities?

Hidden Talent shows how ten companies, from a global tech firm and a major hospital to a small painting company, effectively invest in this marginalized and routinely overlooked talent-and the practical lessons they have learned on that journey.

Loaded with practical steps and best practices, Hidden Talent shows how to:

• Identify specific opportunities for employing refugees, the formerly incarcerated or people with disabilities.
• Use 5 interviewing tips from a former inmate turned business owner.
• Onboard non-English speaking employees more effectively.
• Successfully employ different levels of talent on the autism spectrum.
• Train supervisors to engage more effectively with marginalized workers.
• Build productive partnerships to create new talent pipelines.

Hidden Talent is packed with useful lessons from businesses that are already profiting from these over looked sources of great employees. If it was easy, every organization would be accessing these labor pools. But it's not. This book shows how innovative leaders tackle the challenges of hiring employees they would have ignored in the past. Learn how investing in marginalized workers can change your company's performance, culture and, perhaps, your life.

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"Hidden Talent provides actionable strategies that help businesses tap into valuable talent pools."-Jaimie Francis, head of Talent Pipeline Management(R) initiative, U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation

"This is a great read! The stories are totally engaging. DeLong nails it. A very timely book."- Michael Tamasi, CEO, AccuRounds

Author: David DeLong
Publisher: Longstone Press
Published: 01/28/2025
Pages: 326
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.96lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.68d
ISBN: 9780988868625


Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 04/15/2025

About the Author
DeLong, David: - For more than 30 years, author, speaker, and consultant Dr. David DeLong, has helped leaders implement practical solutions to address critical skill shortages and improve knowledge retention in a fast-changing, technology-driven economy. Today, David focuses solely on helping organizations tap into the underutilized talent pools described in this book. As an author, David is also known for his widely-praised book, Lost Knowledge: Confronting the Threat of an Aging Workforce (Oxford University Press). He co-authored The Executive Guide to High-Impact Talent Management (McGraw-Hill) and also wrote Graduate to a Great Job: Make Your College Degree Pay Off in Today's Market.A veteran researcher, David has spent over two decades studying the strategic impacts of changing workforce demographics and knowledge loss on organizational performance. He served on the research staff at both MIT's Sloan School of Management and Harvard Business School and taught "Managing Organizational Change" as an adjunct professor at Babson College. He has consulted with and spoken for many organizations such as Microsoft, MasterCard, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, Kraft Foods, Lockheed Martin, The Conference Board, American Organization of Nurse Executives, Council of Manufacturing Associations, Michigan Works, and the Council of State Chambers. His work has been widely cited in The New York Times, Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, the Harvard Business Review blog, and CIO magazine. David holds a master's in public administration from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and a doctorate in organizational behavior from Boston University's Questrom School of Business.