Notable Champions of Diversity

Thanks in part to her advocacy, Rosa Estrada, corporate controller at Zeeland, Mich.-based high-tech electronics supplier Gentex Corp., belongs to a growing community of more than 130 Gentex employees who speak Spanish.

There’s a corporate infrastructure that’s set up to recruit and train Spanish-speaking applicants, and to provide them with human resources, English language instruction from third-party providers, and other corporate services once they’re hired. 

For instance, in her role as corporate controller, Estrada provides Spanish translations of payroll, tax and other financial documents.

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Gentex is also considering expanding its Limited English Proficiency program, potentially to include other groups for whom English is a second language.

It wasn’t always that way. 

“Years ago, if somebody came in to do an interview, we didn’t have recruiting people who spoke Spanish. If you couldn’t make it through the interview, there wasn’t going to be a successful hire,” Estrada said. “For safety, we didn’t have the structure. If we couldn’t train them, we couldn’t bring them in.”

Estrada is a native of Mexico. She joined Gentex in Michigan at age 19 to work on an assembly line. She said she spoke very limited English, barely made it through the Gentex job interview, and worried constantly that she might not understand instructions, or even casual conversation in English.

Since then, she attended college using the Gentex tuition reimbursement program, and today, she holds a bachelor’s degree in accounting and an MBA.

“I was in production for about five years, before moving into a salary position,” she said. “I worked in the quality department for a couple years after being in production, and before I started in an entry-level position in accounting, as an accounts receivable specialist.” She became corporate controller in 2018.

What has changed to bring about the demographic shift at Gentex? 

In the short run, a couple of years ago Gentex management started soliciting ideas to address the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent rebound. 

The rebound, and generous government-sponsored financial support, created a seller’s market for labor. 

“Definitely there was a lot of competition. We could see local manufacturers, everybody was raising their wages quite a bit,” Estrada said.

Spanish speakers had become the fastest-growing demographic category in the area around Zeeland and nearby Holland, she said.

“The demographics have changed drastically from 10 years ago,” Estrada said. The U.S. Census says Hispanic or Latino residents accounted for 22 percent of the population in Holland as of July 2021.

Those two factors made Gentex receptive to the idea of the Limited English Proficiency program and other innovations aimed at recruiting, training and retaining Spanish speakers, Estrada said.

The next innovation could be to expand the concept to other growing groups. It’s just that Spanish speakers were far and away the biggest local group, Estrada said. 

For other groups, she said, “We certainly are open to it. We would love to do that.”

— Jim Henry