Strategies for hiring diverse teams and creating inclusive workplaces
Five ways to support employees and strengthen your business
Insight exists to provide collaborative learning spaces where Fellows do impactful work leading to thriving careers. Fellows come to Insight to learn from one another, so we must ensure that each cohort isn’t just technically skilled but also diverse, with opportunities to learn alongside people with different backgrounds and experiences. We’re committed to seeing our Fellows become the next leaders of their fields, so we have to push for changes in the companies where they’ll be employed, so that they — and everyone else — can contribute to a tech industry where they feel valued and included.
In October, our NYC office organized an event to discuss strategies for recruiting diverse candidates, reducing bias in the interview process, and fostering inclusive environments. The panel was moderated by Richard Hughes (Director of Recruiting at Managed by Q) and included Amy Wolf Forrester (Senior HR Business Partner at Compass), Annie DeStefano (Senior Manager, Engineering Operations at Foursquare), and Haile Owusu (SVP of Analytics, Decisions and Data Sciences at Turner). In addition to the panel, we were joined by an audience spanning a range of roles in human resources, People Ops, and technical recruiting.
Here were some top takeaways from the panel and audience:
Don’t get derailed by debates about “the value of diversity”
Some companies invest in diversity and inclusion (D&I) because it makes good business sense, whereas others are motivated by a sense of social justice. It doesn’t have to be either/or; there may be multiple, interconnected ‘whys’ behind D&I efforts. As Amy brought up, there’s extensive research on the impact of diversity on team effectiveness. There’s also a human side, as Haile shared: throughout his career — as a Physics PhD and postdoc, then data scientist, and now leading his own team — he has often found himself as the only black person in the room, or in rooms where there are no women present. As he described, it is “deeply disinviting” to be on the downside of that, and you can imagine how making candidates or employees feel excluded, even inadvertently, can negatively impact a company’s bottom line.
The main point here is that, if you can align your team behind a common motivation for D&I, great! But don’t let attempts at unification paralyze your efforts. Make clear that actions related to D&I need to happen and, while motivations may vary, it is a value prioritized across the organization.
Help your team play a role in attracting diverse candidates
Haile’s previous experience was in startups, where recruiting often relied on LinkedIn and personal networks. While these referrals can yield excellent candidates, it’s important to keep in mind that, if your connections share your background, they probably also share your biases. Consider using tools like Jopwell — a platform to connect with Black, Latinx, and Native American students and professionals — to move beyond your team’s current network.
As Annie described, “beautiful things can happen” once you’ve built a diverse team. You now have a pool of people to represent the company at recruitment events and serve as role models to junior members. The diversity of your team is a valuable recruiting asset — “a one-hour investment in recruiting now will pay dividends in the long run” — so help your team understand why their participation in outreach is a priority, and provide tools and trainings to make it easier and more efficient.
Let candidates know that it’s OK if they don’t ‘check all of the boxes’ — they should still apply!
You can also make progress on diversity goals by paying attention to employer branding; the impression that candidates get from interacting with your company, like the language in your job posting and the content of your careers page. Amy advised using these sites to make clear that diversity is a priority for your organization, and that the company is not just open to but genuinely excited about considering candidates who bring unique or non-traditional perspectives to their work. Let candidates know that it’s OK if they don’t ‘check all of the boxes’ — they should still apply! This addition to your job descriptions is key to avoid excluding many great candidates, especially women, who may not apply for jobs unless they meet 100% of the stated requirements.
Finally, before making your job posting public, consider using products like Textio or FairFrame to highlight bias that may make candidates feel excluded or unqualified.
Train your team to identify and reduce bias
Bias can creep in at every stage of the interview process, from reviewing resumes to making a final decision about who to hire. Some companies use tools to de-identify application materials by removing names and community affiliations, ask team members to avoid looking at LinkedIn (since many profiles have a photo), and even mask voices in phone interviews. As Haile pointed out, there’s ample evidence about the bias-busting effects of removing names from resumes, but relying on technology is an incomplete solution; interviewers will need to come face-to-face with candidates eventually!
Make sure that all participants in the hiring process, including resume reviewers, receive adequate training on what bias is, when it can occur, and how it can be avoided. Annie emphasized that interview training should not be treated as a ‘one and done’ solution — it is a “living and breathing process” that requires continual care. After the initial training, schedule ongoing evaluations and follow-ups to ensure interviewers are consistently engaging in best practices and to identify ways to improve the training process. No training will remove 100% of an interviewer’s bias, but it should help them acknowledge their responsibility for being aware of their biases and provide insight into how it may affect their decision making.
A well-planned interview process — including ramping up a well-trained interview team — takes time. Unfortunately, as Haile noted, the ‘bias protections’ built into a thoughtful hiring workflow are often trimmed when trying to hire quickly. Help your team see that rushing the process might fill the role sooner but, in doing so, you may act in ways that conflict with your stated commitment to diversity. As Amy described, if you rush to fill the role, you may not devote enough time to defining core competencies and training team members to assess them, leading to more subjective (and more biased) evaluations. To ensure you’re not turning down candidates from diverse backgrounds, Richard advised training interviewers to stay open-minded about how key competencies were gained, using a scorecard to structure the process (many teams use Greenhouse to create scorecards for each stage of the interview process).
Ask: “Will this candidate bring something to our organization that we don’t already have, or something we haven’t thought about before?”
Moreover, if interviewers are not adequately trained in detecting and challenging bias, evaluating a candidate’s cultural fit can actively harm diversity efforts, since we are more likely to perceive someone as a good ‘fit,’ absent of clear criteria, if they seem like us. For this reason, Annie suggested that instead of culture fit, teams should evaluate for culture add. Ask, “will this candidate bring something to our organization that we don’t already have, or something we haven’t thought about before?” Amy agreed, if your interviewers aren’t well-trained, your process for measuring cultural fit is broken. Consider tasking interviewers with evaluating value fit, or alignment with the team or company’s core values.
To hire diverse candidates, select diverse interviewers
Keep in mind that biases aren’t just limited to factors like skin color, gender, or age. For example, as Haile described, interviewers’ perceptions can be biased by their own academic experiences or intellectual traditions, causing them to favor candidates from a similar background. Or, as Annie explained, an extroverted interviewer may perceive talkative candidates as being “more engaged in the conversation” because they share a similar communication style. To help reduce bias in the interview process, explicitly choose a panel of interviewers who think differently from you and each other, who come from different intellectual traditions, and who exhibit different communication styles.
During the interview debrief, each interviewer should share their assessment — but the most senior members — and/or those with the loudest voices — should go last.
After interviews have been completed, the next critical stage is the post-interview debrief, which Amy suggested should ideally occur in-person, and after everyone has submitted their interview scorecards or other evaluation notes. You may also want to have an adjudicator present to challenge bias and ask hard questions, even to senior staff. During the interview debrief, each interviewer should share their assessment, but the most senior members, and/or those with the loudest voices, should go last. Annie elaborated on this, encouraging the audience to pay attention to how the meeting leader can set the tone and shape others’ responses. If one person typically leads these meetings, their biases may be heavily shaping hiring decisions, so ask them to leave plenty of room for others to contribute before they weigh in.
In past startup roles, Haile participated in ‘gut-driven’ processes to evaluate culture fit — and hired some great team members as a result. But the resulting team lacked diversity, and their narrow vision of what the ideal candidate ‘looked like’ became entrenched. Now, he makes sure to install a diverse panel of interviewers, pulling people from other departments to provide additional points of view. Annie also spoke to having a revolving panel of trained team members to conduct interviews, encouraging interviewers to switch roles (so they’re not always performing the same type of interviews), frequently cycling in new people, and having interviewers partner or shadow each other.
Create an environment where inclusion is a clear priority
Annie brought up that if a company values diversity, it should be embodied in how they carry out every step of the recruiting process. Then, once a new team member has been hired, they must put forth real efforts for inclusion — and these should start as soon as the job offer is signed. Make sure employees have an on-boarding experience that helps them feel valued and included. Annie reminded the audience that seemingly small things matter a lot, like providing all new hires with an individualized on-boarding document and designating someone to invite new people to general and niche communication channels.
As Haile discussed, large corporations often offer affinity or employee resource groups (ERGs), which provide a forum for employees from underrepresented or minority groups — like women, people of color, LGBTQ folks, etc. — to find support and engage in networking. When you add a new person to the team, make sure to publicize and promote the groups’ existence. And as Amy noted, consider joining those groups yourself; ERGs exist to provide education and increase awareness in the rest of the organization, and allies are often welcomed. (Check out Five to Nine, a tool to increase workplace connectivity, foster inclusion, and help measure the impact of employee experiences like ERGs. You can also download Culture Amp’s 2018 Diversity, Inclusion and Intersectionality Report to learn more about how experiences of inclusion and belonging can shape employee engagement.)
As Haile concluded, “you cannot underestimate how weird it is to join a team where no one is like you.” Develop continual awareness of others’ perspectives, and use this as motivation to make both diversity and inclusion a priority for your team.
Thank you again to our moderator, Richard, and to our panelists Amy, Annie, and Haile. We’re also grateful for the audience members who shared their thoughts and experiences with the group. Insight recognizes the importance of diverse and inclusive workplaces, and the vital role we can play as our network of Fellows join the tech industry. We also recognize the work still needed for diverse teams to be the standard we all strive to meet. We hope events like these will keep a dialogue going, so we can all be more aware of how our actions perpetuate bias — and how we can work together to identify and minimize the effects.
Interested in transitioning to a career in data or engineering?
Learn more about Insight, apply today, or sign up for updates.
Interested in hiring data professionals or partnering with Insight?
Reach out to learn more about partnering with Insight, or sign up for the latest content on how to find and hire the best talent for specialized roles in data and tech.
