Penn State's Alumni Association and human resource department have joined forces to encourage a more diverse workforce.

The human resource department first contacted the Alumni Association to strategize a way to contact alumni in the form of a survey to ask about the diversity in their businesses.

Roger Williams, the executive director of the Alumni Association, said the four-question survey was sent to more than 154,000 alumni members. As of Oct. 24, 3,750 have been returned.

Williams said the survey asked alumni for the best practices in recruiting and retaining diverse employees from businesses and organizations from which Penn State alumni are affiliated.

Matt McDonald, assistant director of marketing and communications for the Alumni Association, said the survey is Web-based because it was the best way to contact large numbers of alumni.

"The purpose [of the survey] is really for the Office of Human Resources to benchmark the practices of other business to retain a diverse network," said McDonald. "The survey will then show what efforts Penn State is not currently utilizing but could be."

Williams said 125 alumni said they were interested in volunteering more information if needed.

"We basically asked folks to just take a few moments to answer the four question survey and to get back to us as soon as they possibly could, but we did not put a [specific] deadline on it," Williams said.

After accumulating all of the completed surveys, members from the Alumni Association and human resources will be looking at data, analyzing the information and distributing it with other departments across the university, Williams said.

"We want to see if there are any diversity recruitment approaches that seemed to have worked for other businesses that might work for us," Williams said. "We also want to see if there are certain patterns that occur."

This information will also be used to achieve the university's diversity goals which are part of the Framework to Foster Diversity, he said.

According to the Framework to Foster Diversity, one of the goals is to expand faculty and staff retention programs to include all underrepresented groups. The current framework is set to expire in December, and a new one will be drafted soon after.

In addition, the office of human resources plans to develop relationships between diverse employees and students to create internship programs and other resources, said Susan Morse, manager of employment compensation for the Office of Human Resources.

"We want [Penn State] to be the best that we can be and we want to raise the awareness of diversity," Morse said. "Diversity is like the spice of life. If everyone is the same it isn't as interesting as it could be and we really think diversity helps everyone."