Chobani’s VP of people shares why the company has been so successful at hiring refugees

After founding Chobani in 2005, CEO Hamdi Ulukaya found himself needing to hire good, reliable workers to support his quickly growing company. Ulukaya, a Turkish immigrant, had heard of the employment challenges facing refugees in the US and, as he told Fortune in February, worked with a refugee resource organization called The Center to help them translate their skills to his yogurt factory. By 2018, refugees and immigrants accounted for 30% of his workforce, Ulukaya told Inc.

Even as rumors of a recession loom, there are still 10.7 million job openings in the US. Despite this, and the low unemployment rate, a February study from Cornell found that there are many structural obstacles to finding refugees long-term employment in the US. However, there are ways people pros can thoughtfully integrate refugees into their organizations.

Intentional hiring. It’s not that employers don’t want to help: 45 companies, including Hilton, PepsiCo, and Pfizer committed in September to collectively hiring more than 20,000 refugees in the US in the next three years. The issue, experts told HR Brew, is that HR leaders often have preconceived notions about hiring refugees and don’t know how to go about recruiting them.

For example, the US has admitted approximately 25,000 refugees in 2022, more than double the less than 12,000 who settled in the country in 2020. They have been vetted by the US government, often for years, and have working papers. Many HR professionals don’t realize this, explained Hannah Roche, program manager at Global Talent, an organization that helps refugees find jobs.

Despite these perceived barriers to entry, Chobani has been able to intentionally recruit and advance refugees in the workplace.

Brandon Dansie, VP of people at Chobani, told HR Brew that Chobani’s efforts have been successful in part because the company has built trust with refugees and the people they trust. “Generally speaking, [refugees] were forced from their country for a variety of different reasons, not by their own accord,” he explained. They’re in a new place, with a new language they may not speak , and may be hesitant to trust people, he said.

Some HR leaders also think hiring refugees requires a lot of time and money, explained Gideon Maltz, executive director at Tent Partnership for Refugees. He said this is another misconception, and that HR leaders should look to local nonprofits for help finding talent: “Agencies will have a roster of refugees, and they can actually work closely with locals so the company can recommend particular refugees and to help steer them through the process.” Dansie agreed, explaining that refugee resettlement agencies know what job-seekers have done in the past and how each person may add to a company.

Application barriers. Misconceptions aside, though, HR leaders may not even see refugees’ résumés. While they may be in need of employment, Maltz told HR Brew, “Refugees probably aren’t applying to open positions that companies are posting on LinkedIn, or some sort of job board.” They may not be familiar with the application process or have the professional networks that many job-seekers rely on to find work.

HR teams may also inadvertently ignore résumés from refugees due to résumé gaps. “In the case of refugees, that may be because they had fled and were sitting in a refugee camp for five years,” Maltz explained, adding that “HR departments may [also] be unfamiliar with the universities they’ve attended or their skills or certifications.”

Chobani’s program, and others like it, has been successful because its HR leaders have actively sought out refugee workers. “If [employers] actually set up an intentional program that is designed to address all these barriers, then [that] can be hugely effective,” Maltz said.

Language barriers. Communication, Maltz said, is usually one of HR professionals’ chief concerns about hiring refugees. “Often, companies unintentionally require in the interview process a level of English fluency that may not actually be strictly necessary for the role itself,” he said. He recommended that HR think about if a certain language proficiency is truly needed to succeed in the job at hand.

Ulukaya navigated this by hiring translators for the refugees he hired. For companies that can’t hire translators, Maltz said that Tent recommends hiring and onboarding refugees in groups—in which at least one new employee can translate for the rest of the team—and using visual forms of communication when employees first start.

Dansie explained that Chobani also tried “to pair them as best as we can with people with similar language skills that can help them to learn and then grow and essentially say, ‘Look, what our expectations of you are as you show up and you have a good attitude, and then we’re going to help you grow from there.’”

Hiring refugees isn’t just altruistic. It’s good for business, and can give a company a strategic advantage. Chobani, Dansie said, has watched workers grow from hourly line leads to plant supervisors.

Refugees are “part of the fabric of the company,” Dansie explained. “Refugees, in particular, [have] been here as long as Greek yogurt has been here. That’s how integral this is to our culture.”—KP

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