Our People

Careers at Penguin Random House

Our dedicated team of publishing professionals is committed to helping authors realize their very best work and to finding innovative new ways of bringing stories and ideas to audiences worldwide. To explore job openings at Penguin Random House, visit our Careers website here.

Our Social Impact

We bring people together by amplifying storytelling and diverse voices, not only in the books and in the authors we publish, but also within our company, by working to create the most equitable and inclusive home where all are welcome and where every person is empowered to be themselves and to share their perspectives. For more information about our commitment to Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, view our most recent DEI report.

2024 Penguin Random House U.S. Workforce Composition

At Penguin Random House, fulfilling our mission to create books for everyone is made possible by having a workforce that reflects our society. Today we are releasing our fifth annual workforce demographics report to share our progress, along with updates on key actions and programming.

Here is a snapshot of PRH’s current workforce makeup.

This next chart shows the breakout of the company’s employees by race in both 2023 and 2024, alongside U.S. population and industry benchmarks. Note that industry benchmarks include Lee & Low’s most recent Diversity Baseline Survey data from 2023, accompanied by their data from 2019 for comparison. As the charts show, the publishing industry has made modest progress in increasing racial diversity since 2019, with Penguin Random House surpassing the industry average across most categories.

As part of our analysis, we extracted the data specifically associated with our Editorial and Marketing & Publicity teams because these roles directly shape and support the content we publish. These teams are heavily involved in our efforts to publish and promote a more diverse population of creators. The makeup of our Editorial teams is comparable with 2023, while our Marketing & Publicity teams show a modest increase in racial diversity. Moving forward, we will continue to focus attention and resources on these strategic areas of our business.

This chart shows the racial makeup of our population at different career levels, with our 2023 data included for comparison. While our entry-level, individual contributor, and people manager populations continue to racially diversify, there’s still much work to be done to increase the diversity of our company leadership, especially within our People Manager and Executive Teams levels.

This next chart shows the racial makeup of the company’s new hires over the last six years.

The percentage of new hires in the White demographic showed a notable increase in 2024. There were also fluctuations within the multiple BIPOC demographic categories over the past year. As the chart shows, the percentage of Asian new hires decreased in 2023 but is higher than both U.S. population and publishing industry averages. The percentage of Black new hires is now beginning to trend upward after significant dips in 2022 and 2023. Overall, we have not yet achieved and maintained our new hire demographic goals, and the continued importance of our targeted recruitment and outreach efforts cannot be overstated.

Updates on Our Actions

As our demographics show, while we continue to improve in some areas, we have a long way to go to make our workforce representative of U.S. society—and we are committed to staying the course. Our Diversity Recruitment, Outreach and Partnerships team continue to focus on many levels of our workforce. We are successfully reaching candidates at the intern and entry levels with extensive campus outreach to schools, including Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Additionally, we have established critical relationships with diversity-focused partner organizations that are helping us build a pipeline of qualified candidates who are interested in the publishing industry.

We have further educated these candidates with our Careers Across Publishing panel series, which in 2024 added representatives from IT and Children’s Publishing, and also offered Design portfolio tips. In addition to hosting schools for in-person panels, we held two large-scale Zoom panels with more than 350 attendees at each.

Our Publishing Pathways program, an educational program launched in 2023 that supports the transition of BIPOC/People of the Global Majority and disabled professionals to the publishing industry from other fields, has gained strength and reach in 2024, with applications and enrollment significantly up from last year.

Cultivating diverse candidate pools for open roles is not just the responsibility of recruitment teams; we all have a role to play in increasing the diversity of our workforce. Because every manager has the potential to be a hiring manager at some point, we are beginning to develop workshops that give all managers skills and tips for building stronger, more diverse networks.

Beyond recruitment and outreach, we have continued to center retention, promotion, and development opportunities to ensure all employees—particularly those from historically underrepresented groups—feel consistently supported and valued. Throughout the past two years, we revamped the company’s onboarding process with this goal in mind, including formalizing feedback checkpoints and establishing a structured buddy system.

In our ongoing efforts to increase the representation of communities of color within our leadership teams specifically, we are committed to analyzing what kinds of support are needed for people who come to publishing from other industries to thrive here, and then working to effectively execute those measures. We’ve also vastly improved our exit-interview data collection and reporting capabilities—an essential aspect of understanding retention and development issues and patterns.

This is a marathon, not a sprint—and despite the ups and downs this journey toward greater representation brings, we remain committed to providing transparency and accountability along the way. More detail on these initiatives, as well as a holistic view of DEI-related actions across Penguin Random House, can be found within our 2024-2026 DEI Strategic Plan. We look forward to continuing to share our progress with you.

Our Approach to Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

At Penguin Random House, our mission is to create books for everyone. We believe diverse voices should be elevated and amplified within our community and beyond. Every day, we work to build an equitable, inclusive, and psychologically safe work environment for all employees.

Our approach to diversity and inclusion in our business focuses on these five priority areas, or pillars:

• Leadership Investment in Diversity & Inclusion: Hold leaders accountable for implementing PRH’s DEI vision, setting goals, achieving results, and being role models.

• Diversity & Representation: Ensure that attraction, sourcing, and recruitment is done through a DEI lens, making our employee population more representative of society.

• Career Growth: Integrate DEI into talent development, performance management, advancement, and retention efforts.

• Psychological Safety and Belonging: Create a psychologically safe, inclusive work environment through comprehensive learning & development programs and concise DEI communication.

• Content & Marketplace: Demonstrate a measurable companywide increase in content we’re acquiring, publishing, and promoting by diverse contributors with the ultimate goal of publishing books that reflect the world we live in.

These pillars are the guiding principles by which Penguin Random House works to foster a more diverse, equitable and inclusive company culture. In our most recent DEI report, you will find a selection of the programs and initiatives that are underway in support of these overarching pillars.