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Updated August 24, 2022You’re reading an excerpt of The Holloway Guide to Technical Recruiting and Hiring, a book by Osman (Ozzie) Osman and over 45 other contributors. It is the most authoritative resource on growing software engineering teams effectively, written by and for hiring managers, recruiters, interviewers, and candidates. Purchase the book to support the author and the ad-free Holloway reading experience. You get instant digital access, over 800 links and references, commentary and future updates, and a high-quality PDF download.
In 2010, Etsy* was in the midst of an engineering team overhaul. They had decided they needed a fresh team to take on the challenges the company was facing, and in building this incoming team, hiring women engineers was to be a priority. Yet in the year that followed, they experienced an 86% growth in the engineering team and a 35% decline in gender diversity—they had hired 38 new engineers, of which only two were women. In examining what happened during that year, they found three major contributing factors to their failure:
Talking about diversity on its own was not an effective strategy.
To change outcomes, they needed to make significant changes to their interview process.
Because there was no proof of their commitment to diversity, candidates from underrepresented groups were not confident in working for them.
These reflections informed a new approach that not only overhauled their recruiting efforts, but also incorporated new initiatives to create a work environment that resulted in more fair and equitable outcomes for all employees.
With this information, within a year Etsy grew their representation of women in engineering from 4.7% to 18%. Today, according to their most recent diversity report, that number stands at 29.3%. While recruiting with diversity in mind is important, it is just one part of an effective diversity and inclusion program. Enduring diversity requires a sustained commitment to inclusion—an evergreen readiness to change and adapt your organization’s policies, procedures, and behaviors to create a place where every employee can thrive.
While examples from companies like Etsy can help us stay motivated, it can be misleading to look only at the percentages and demographics at other companies. People often look for these numbers elsewhere because they want to follow someone else’s model and because they want or need to prove that success is possible. But “success,” when it comes to D&I, is completely dependent on your team and the company you work for. It’s perfectly fair to take some tips, advice, and ideas from those who have been through this before, and to take note of what the research tells us about where to look to see what’s working. But your goals should be your own; and focusing on numbers can be a distraction from the deeper work of building inclusive practices and policies.
In a summary of several studies into how to assess and improve inclusion, Laura Sherbin and Ripa Rashid lay out four areas for organizations to focus on, beyond the numbers:
Inclusive leaders. A collection of six behaviors, including making it safe to propose novel ideas and empowering team members to make decisions, define leaders who create more inclusive environments. According to Sherbin and Rashid, of employees who report that their team leader has at least three of these traits, “87% say they feel welcome and included in their team, 87% say they feel free to express their views and opinions, and 74% say they feel that their ideas are heard and recognized.”
Authenticity. Their research also found that 37% of Black and Hispanic respondents and 45% of Asians say they “need to compromise their authenticity” in order to meet their company’s standards of demeanor or style.
Networking and visibility. Sponsorship is critical for career advancement for members of URGs. “A sponsor is a senior-level leader who elevates their protégé’s visibility within the corridors of power, advocates for key assignments and promotions for them, and puts their reputation on the line for the protégé’s advancement.” A sponsor also improves a URG’s satisfaction with their rate of career advancement and reduces the likelihood of that person quitting.
Clear career paths. Sherbin and Rashid found that, among women, “29% say their career isn’t satisfying, and 23% feel stalled in their careers.” Other URGs feel similarly stymied, often without a clear course for how to improve their situation. In the sections on levels and compensation, we strongly advocate for having clearly defined ladders for career progression, which are transparently mapped to salary and other compensation.
Beyond the advice above, three additional strategies can help you iterate and improve your hiring process.
Setting up a basic feedback process is low-hanging fruit that all hiring teams can grab, and it’s especially helpful in the context of D&I. Anonymous feedback can show you a lot that’s going on in your process that you wouldn’t catch otherwise. But do this only if you plan to listen closely to the feedback, even when it hurts.
Send a survey to candidates with both quantitative questions (such as, “How likely are you to reapply for one of our positions in the future?”) and qualitative questions (like, “What was the highlight of your interview experience? What about a low point?”).
Have every single response read by a human. You never know how much impact one comment from an underrepresented candidate could have in making you aware of your blind spots. And if you end up hearing about an inappropriate joke from an interviewer or a hiring manager who was passive-aggressive, treat the feedback as a gift to help you improve in a way that you would not have known about otherwise. By ensuring the same mistake doesn’t get repeated, you’re getting better at your game and will be less likely to lose top candidates in the future.
Take your conversion rates (for example, what percentage of resumes submitted are moved to phone screen?) and intersect them with demographic data collected by Equal Employment Opportunity, an optional set of questions that can be enabled in your ATS, like Lever.*
For example, you might find that underrepresented candidates are passing phone screens but falling off after onsite panels at a disproportionately high rate. This tells you there is likely some sort of bias in a particular stage. With this information, you can identify the problem like a detective: maybe it’s an untrained interviewer turning people off. Maybe the type of questions asked are unfair to a certain group.
In addition to conversion rates, you can run the same analysis with interview scores. If underrepresented groups are consistently ranking lower in certain stages and questions, maybe there’s underlying bias at play. More opportunities for detective work! (If you aren’t yet confident about how to employ recruiting metrics, Jennifer Kim wrote a beginner’s guide, “Recruiting Analytics Made Simple.”)
We’ve compiled all the links and resources from this section, plus many more that we didn’t include, into Appendix C for easy reference.
How does a senior director of engineering end up working to help companies improve their D&I efforts? Read Jason Wong’s story, “My Journey in Diversity and Inclusion,” on the Holloway blog.