If you were an HR executive in a company that relies on internal referrals using the social media, what steps would you take to prevent this practice from engendering a more homogeneous workforce and thus blocking the firm from meeting its diversity objectives? Explain.

While recommending a friend for a job has always been a natural way of recruiting employees, it might present a major barrier to diversity because employees tend to recommend people like themselves.
The social media may compound this problem as more and more companies rely on social media as a source of internal referrals and thus save time and money in their recruitment efforts.
For example, both Ernst & Young and Deloitte now hire about half of their employees from these internal referral sources, combing employee networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook to identify potential candidates. These social sites allow companies to trace connections between job candidates and their employees, facilitating the generation of internal referrals and thus avoiding the use of cumbersome job-search sites such as Monster.Com. In fact, prospective candidates using those open-ended job search sites now suffer from negative stereotypes. Some corporate recruiters refer to applicants from Internet job sites as “Homers,” referring to the lazy, doughnut-eating character Homer Simpson, and they refer to Monster.Com as “Monster.Ugly.” Social sites such as LinkedIn do not carry a stigma for potential applicants because the company can trace the connection between a potential job candidate and current employees, and this removes much of the information uncertainty surrounding other potential candidates who are not part of the network.