Why do some tech companies succeed in hiring women and minority engineers while others struggle with even attracting qualified candidates? And if we care enough to take steps to improve this situation within our teams, our companies, and our industry as a whole, what should we do about it?

In the last half of 2014, tech companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and many others published employee data broken out by gender and race which highlight large shortfalls in the numbers of women and minorities working in the tech industry when compared to the population overall. Much investment has been made in the last decade to shore up the educational “Pipeline” by making computer science and STEM studies interesting and widely available to young women and minorities, and these efforts are starting to pay off through significantly increased rates of participation and graduation in STEM degree and alternative training programs (see this and this). These investments in education are starting to yield results, and the impact will be tremendous.

Over the last several years, however, I’ve come to believe that antiquated and ineffective hiring practices remain a critical factor for why there are so few women and minorities working in tech, and that this is the next hurdle facing tech companies trying to improve those diversity stats. Unfortunately, these broken hiring practices contribute both directly and indirectly to the problem of employee diversity through several feedback loops:

• a lack of women and minorities on a team makes it harder to attract and hire new women and minority candidates because they do not see evidence of others like them being successful in the organization;
• referrals from current employees generally reinforce existing patterns of race and gender;
• a lack of women and minorities in roles with hiring authority unconsciously promote biases in job descriptions that repel candidates from applying;
• and in some cases, the recruitment and hiring process is so caustic for candidates that they spread word in their personal networks to avoid working for (or even interviewing with) that company, making it even harder to get diverse candidates to apply.

My interest in this topic developed initially as a result of my own experience as a software engineering professional. As a software industry veteran, I have now worked for many different companies and interviewed with dozens more, from startups to large multi-national corporations, and encompassing many different sectors in technology, including enterprise computing, defense contracting, telecommunications, gaming, and SaaS web-based software. Throughout my career, I’ve encountered frustrating, ineffective, and even counter-productive hiring practices while sitting on both sides of the interview table. My experiences as both an engineer and a hiring manager have led me to study recent research on behavioral and social psychology around bias, the cognitive processes of how people make judgements and decisions, especially in an interview setting, and what solutions are offered by this research to increase the effectiveness of recruiting and hiring by knowing about and compensating for biases in hiring processes. Last October I gave a talk at the Grace Hopper conference in Phoenix that consolidated my thoughts and offered practical and concrete recommendations on how we can fix these broken technical hiring practices on our own teams (slide deck is here). Over the last year, I’ve also experimented with some innovative interview formats with my team at Moz (described here in more detail). We’ve had some success in our approach, and I’m excited to continue to evaluate and improve our practices.

My team is not the only one examining and making changes to be more open and attractive to diverse candidates. Since giving my talk, I’ve heard about a few initiatives at tech companies to change their hiring practices to be less prone to bias. For example, Google instituted recent changes to standardize interview question sets, train interviewers in unconscious biases, and collect ongoing data about candidates and those who become successful employees. Etsy continues to fine-tune their hiring practices. Etsy SVP Mark Hedlund shared their practices in a detailed YouTube interview. Intel has also announced an initiative backed by $300M to increase representation of women and underrepresented minorities in tech over the next 5 years. All of these approaches are a good start to addressing these hiring challenges and have made a difference for those organizations who have made changes, and more work is still needed.

Research correlates higher profitability, stronger innovation, and better corporate performance with companies that have more diversity on their staff (see this and this). Additionally, there is an industry-wide perception that there are not enough qualified professionals in computing fields to fill current job demand (see this and this) — which is only exacerbated by unconsciously exclusionary hiring practices — and the gap is only growing. With this growing evidence, the question should clearly be “How can we take steps now to improve diversity in our teams and companies?” instead of sloughing off this responsibility to others. It is not enough for a handful of companies in the tech industry to tackle the challenge of workforce diversity and expect the problem to go away. As leaders and hiring managers in our teams and companies, it is our responsibility and our imperative to pull out our microscopes and our stethoscopes and really examine, with critical eyes and ears, how the practices and cultures of our teams enable or inhibit our diversity efforts. Happily, recruiting and hiring processes are relatively easy to change and better approaches are within reach of every team through training, good data and measurement, and desire to improve. It is time for all of us in technology, and especially those of us in a position to make a difference, to look more carefully at our own contribution to the diversity problem and take steps towards a solution.