The National Basketball Association

Off the Courts: NBA Score Higher With Diverse Talent
Case Study

The Challenge

As a global sports and media business, the NBA is so much more than immediately meets the eye. While Basketball Operations runs the league’s on-court activities, other departments do everything from managing relationships with television and digital media partners to developing marketing partnerships with some of the world’s most recognizable companies, overseeing the licensing of NBA merchandise, and handling a wide range of responsibilities that drive the NBA’s success. 

As part of the NBA’s talent acquisition approach, they needed help positioning the company as the varied organization it is and not solely as a leader in basketball. This would ensure that more candidates, across roles and skill sets, would convert into applications, offers, and ultimately hires.

Additionally, the NBA, like many other companies, was looking to attract talent from underrepresented and diverse backgrounds. In particular, they hoped to hire more women of color in their engineering and product roles, which historically had been a challenge for them.

 

The Goal

The NBA wanted to unify their voice across their communication channels, refresh their narrative, and highlight stories around what drives women at work in a personal, resonant way so that more people could see themselves as agents of change within the organization.

Not only was this strategy crucial to building up their pipeline of early-career talent, but it was also essential if they hoped to have better representation of women of color in their tech roles.

Learn how our DEIB solutions can help your company

PowerToFly Partnership

Our Employer Branding services help broadcast your diversity and inclusion efforts. This helps to build awareness with hard-to-reach and underrepresented candidates and shows your company cares.

Also, through our Talent Acquisition solution, we source diverse candidates that meet your role requirements, conduct phone screening and technical tests, and schedule interviews.

  • Company Page
  • Unlimited Job Postings
  • Branded Content
  • Dedicated Sourcing

The Solution: Show Women They Belong

It was important for the NBA to diversify their recruitment process if they wanted to reach their ideal target candidates, women of color. To help the NBA attract this talent, we created custom videos showcasing their team and encouraging diverse candidates to apply while simultaneously sharing tips for job seekers and other career advice.

To build credibility, we built them a company page on our site, where the NBA can share their diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging efforts as well as the benefits they provide to women employees. In addition, we partnered on creating blog posts that featured the personal stories of women working for the NBA and helped them engage their target audience in the U.S. and globally.

Another PowerToFly DEIB solution the NBA opted for was our targeted events, which proved to be very effective in finding various mid-senior engineering and product candidates from diverse backgrounds, who helped build the product team to release the NBA app.

 

NBA quote
Agustina-Aldama-PTF

“I was able to work very closely with the NBA recruiting team and hiring managers. We kept open and transparent communications at all times, which allowed me to fully understand the requirements and skills for their roles and also gave me the opportunity to share with them insights about the market and what their competitors are doing. That helped us achieve excellent results. 

An example of this is that for their Data Product Manager, Advertising role, I noticed that the compensation range wasn't aligned with the market and that this was a big blocker when it came to accessing good candidates. After sharing these insights with the recruiter and the hiring manager, we were able to update the compensation, and the role was filled within weeks.”

- Agustina Aldama, Talent Advocate at PowerToFly

 

Are you interested in learning more about our holistic DEIB solutions?

The Impact

With our Employer Branding and Talent Acquisition support, the NBA proved the advantages of being an organization that embeds diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in its recruitment process, brand identity, and retention initiatives.

These results were measured the following ways:

The NBA had five offers and four hires to build the product team:
  • Cloud Security Engineer
  • Solution Architect, Application Development
  • Project Employee, Broadcast Operations
  • Senior Network Cloud Engineer
  • Senior Native Mobile Engineer
They effectively raised awareness about the benefits of working for them, aligning their brand positioning with the audience they wanted to attract. They received:
awareness-results.NBA(1)
The brand’s awareness grew, and helped them to make many more hires.

Learn about our DEIB solutions

If you want to learn more about our hiring, attraction, and retention solutions, book a call or email us at answers@powertofly.com.